It would be simplistic to describe this exhibition as one that merely features photographs or photography. Our understanding of the term ‘photography’ creates an expectation to see photographs as either art, with technical application and formal aesthetic as prime concerns, or as a document of historical value, recognised for its high degree of neutrality and exactness. In the early history of photography, these two diacritical positions were demonstrated by the black and white prints of Alfred Stieglitz and Lewis Hine. Although both were New York-based photographers from the same era, Stieglitz once described his use of photography ‘as a distinctive medium of individual expression’, whereas for Hine, a pioneer of photojournalism, photography was an instrument for research, reportage and reflection of social reality.
Undeniably, the chief medium of these works, from the 1990s, by Susanne Brügger, Thomas Demand and Heidi Specker is photography. Nevertheless, without compromising their aesthetic concerns, the images exemplified the development of contemporary German photography towards application beyond its given framework. Within this expanded field questions and issues regarding reality, space, representation, and the roles of photography arise. In short, real space conceptual space is very much an exhibition of meta-photographs which, in place of theoretical discourse, examines the nature of photography through the practice itself.
The original title of this exhibition, in German, is realer raum bild raum. The word ‘bild’ could be literally translated as view, image, figure, or painting. Therefore, the title can also mean ‘pictorial space’. However, in the context of this exhibition, the usage of realer (which could be translated as real, physical or actual) and bild is neither a juxtaposition of pure binary opposites, untainted by one another, nor a regression to the old debates concerning the authenticity of photographs and high art. The curatorial theme has gone further to destabilise the fixed meanings of the two terms in order to allow an awareness of how reality, which could be written like fiction, is often like composed like a picture.
Of the many virtual and imaginary elements, one crucial point lies in our idea of reality itself. The curator for the exhibition, Ute Eskildsen states, ‘The starting point for the practice of photography is no longer necessarily the existing reality. We should not lament this development, for a glance at the history of photography shows clearly that reality, long assumed to be an essential basis, has always been merely a starting point for the expression of an idea.’ Yet, this claim of negating ‘existing reality’ to allow a shift of emphasis to the ‘expression of an idea’ should not be understood as an absolute negligence of ‘reality’ as a subject matter or artistic concern. This is because any idea which emerged from reality cannot be divorced from reality and this is obvious from the common subject of ‘public’ space (raum) in the works featured. Conversely, it should also be added how these pictures of the external world where the viewers and artists are situated, represent three distinctive stances that suggest how our worldviews (weltanschauung) are deeply ideological. In other words, it is of how our perception of reality, which emerges from reality itself, is an idea of reality but not reality itself.
Thomas Demand
In Thomas Demand’s Detail series, the window-sized C-prints are images of seemingly banal interior spaces that range from a sink with unwashed dishes to an office cubicle with an untidy table to a massage parlour. Upon closer observation, the little details in each image reveal to viewers that these spaces were in fact fabricated from cardboard. Firstly, the realisation of how this is not a representation of reality, but of a pseudoreality, relates one to Rene Magritte’s paintings that are often about such conceptual overlaps. In Demand’s case, this pictorial mis en abyme is manifold with implicit narrative structure. Each image is composed with reference to published photographs from the newspaper or archives. Constructed into three-dimensional objects and spaces from paper, but once again ‘flattened’ when presented as photograph, every picture is a polysemantic, indexical sign, open to multiple readings. For instance, the bathroom in Detail VII recalls a familiar day-to-day scene or a frame from an Alfred Hitcock film. And for viewers in Germany, it would easily be recognised as Demand’s reference to the controversial crime scene of a corpse in the tub photographed by a man who broke into a hotel room. Ironically, the photographer of the original picture, persecuted for his voyeurism, lack of respect for the deceased, and trespassing, was also the person who, few years later, helped provide an important clue to the police investigation with the photograph.
Susanne Brügger
By combining text and symbol with monochromatic archival photographs, Susanne Brügger’s Map Work embodies the discursive structure of scientific disciplines like criminology and anthropology. In these fields, photography plays an integral part in their systems of classification and analysis which discover or, from a more cynical perspective, ‘invent’ facts or truths. Despite adopting their form, her pseudo-scientific project parodies and critiques such discourses that Michel Foucault categorised as the secular ‘regimes of truth’. In this long-running series, her coupling of graphs, charts, maps, diagrams, or old, unidentified portrait photographs with scientific jargons, clichés from the media, or speech conventions in our social interaction, parallels the nostalgic musings of a pataphysician. The dissected aerial views of urban architectural spaces in Map Work XIV – On appropriation: the name of the view, or Gustav for short, highlights the inherent contradictions in how we experience spaces through inhabitation by contrast to their graphic representation. Reflecting the idea of how existence precedes essence, the work expounded how scale systems, when applied in studies such as cartography, geography and architecture aid the conception of distance or length, requires one’s prior experience of the space or site. Moreover, by appropriating such methods of measurement, she undermines the validity and reliability of the system, and reveals its subjective aspects.
Heidi Specker
As a contrast to the bird’s-eye view in Brügger’s pictures, the ink-jet prints of buildings from 1960s to 1970s by Heidi Specker are all bottom-up views of one in the midst of a concrete jungle. In spite of their formal differences in many other aspects, they share a common aim. Throughout her works, Specker demonstrates how the advents of digital photography and image manipulation software have rendered obsolete the notion of photography as a neutral medium. Not that manipulation of the photographic image before the digital revolution was impossible, but now, the extent and ease of executing it have resulted in a quantitative change that offers a qualitative impact. Some might argue these works are not a further development of photography. Instead, with its painterly traits, smudging the boundary between photography and painting, each picture evokes questions concerning painting as a genre defined by its medium, or hints at a return to the practice of painting in pictorial aesthetic. With their subtle colour gradations, simultaneously reminding one of old postcard pictures and watercolour paintings, Marshall McLuhan’s dictum on how ‘the medium is the message’ is therefore
revived.
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In the essay On the Invention of the Photographic Meaning, the photographer-writer Allan Sekula mentioned how a Bushwoman, due to her ‘photographic illiteracy’, could not recognise her son in a photograph. This incident demonstrated how a photograph, operating within a symbolic framework, is not universal but to be read within particular logic and cultural context like a language. With the unprecedented popularity of photography as an artistic medium, and in an age of mobile phone cameras, this anecdote could, perhaps, point to those ‘illiterate’ or those unfamiliar to such concepts and applications of photography – with visual languages of stronger ontological implications – how it requires from one the effort and patience of learning a new language to comprehend and appreciate these alternate existences of what Fox Talbot called ‘the pencil of nature’.
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