British photographer Alastair Thain presented Rapture, a retrospective of photographic portraits, at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, Germany, from 4 June - 13 November, 2005. Exhibiting alongside Martin Parr and Jeff Wall, Thain's work included  twenty large format photographs which represent the creative breadth of his work. Throughout his twenty-year career Alastair Thain has consistently contested notions of what photography is able to achieve. From the outset to the present day Thain has been an innovator. His challenges to photographic convention and obsessive quest for the technical advances that will allow him to fulfil his vision place him in a unique position among contemporary photographic artists.

Most recently Thain has created extremely large photographic works, using the same format camera equipment as NASA employed to photograph the Earth from the space shuttle. These hyper-real images have an unprecedented visual intimacy that reveals something about the people presented: their life, their history, their origins, their fate, their wishes and dreams. Sometimes a tangible sense of the abandonment of hope and aspiration is perceived.

Thain spent 15 years devising his unique cameras in order to achieve not only large-format images that are incredibly precise, but also to capture the subliminal movements and expressions people make that are often at the heart of actions and events. His large-format photographs possess a strange and special presence. This presence stems initially from the majestic scale of the works, whose extreme resolution and clarity exceeds what the eye can generally perceive, and principally from the intuitive choice of moments in which the artist creates these images. These moments often reveal to us that depth of psychological expression, that biography or painful fate which goes to make up a person’s essence, his or her individual special character.

With his photographs, Thain makes us more aware of the individual, the human being, and existence. When contemplating the depth of perception in these photographs we become partners in an imaginary dialogue with people whom we do not know, but who are suddenly so close to us that we cannot elude the invitation to converse with them on the burden of their fate. In the course of that conversation, we will gradually become more aware of the uniqueness, violability and fragility of human existence, with all its positive and negative nuances.