Peggy Buth: The Politics of Selection

The book ‘The Uses of Fear’ recounts a political history of our cities and suburbs. For the artist urban space is a place where the social and the economic overlap, at once forming and deforming the space. In three chapters Peggy Buth reports on social utopias and economic interests, on the attempt to include and exclude people, on hope, and on discrimination and defamation. Her artistic research focuses on the suburbs of Paris, social housing projects and streets in the US state of Missouri, and former working-class neighbourhoods in the Ruhr region, in the north of Essen and in parts of Duisburg.

Peggy Buth, born 1971 in Berlin, studied photography and fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and was a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academy Maastricht, Netherlands. In 2020 she has been appointed a professor at the Department of Photography at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.