Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler, who encouraged him to explore the expressive possibilities of architectural models at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Like those artists, Demand makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to reconstruct scenes he finds in images taken from various media sources. Once he has photographed his re-created environments—always devoid of figures but often displaying evidence of recent human activity—Demand destroys his models, further complicating the relationship between reproduction and original that his photography investigates. 

Demand (born 1964) has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and he has represented Germany at the Venice Biennale and the Bienal de São Paulo. Demand lives and works in Berlin
http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/artists/thomas-demand/

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/meet-artist-thomas-demand

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3653101/Why-this-isnt-a-picture-of-a-cavern.html
In Richard Dermonts review of Thomas Demands work, he argues that all of photography shows things that are both real and unreal. Like Dermonts work, which directly represents things that are  real place, which is then photographed, which he then see's, which he then makes a model out of, which the then photographs, which is then displayed without having the model as it has been destroyed by him each time. Photographs stand in for the true object, they are a tiny snapshot into the present and past at the same time, the present when the photograph was taken, the past when you come to view the image afterwards.