On Photography
On the Occasion of Düsseldorf Photo Weekend 2017
Maria Vedder’s video Blues für einen unbekannten Fotografen (1987) and Róbert Olawuyi’s media-art installation flickr.comment (2009) focus on the still camera. Whereas Vedder playfully stages the camera in a typical studio environment against a dark curtain, Olawuyi gets a Polaroid camera to talk (and curse) about photography.
The legerity of the melodies in Vedder’s video seems at first glance to contradict the work’s title. But it too echoes the question of the point from which melancholy can result from glamourous photographic superficiality. Róbert Olawuyi gets the flood of images he projects on the wall from the photo platform flickr.com. The accompanying critical comments on photography “as addiction” are taken from a text by Thomas Bernhard and are read by the artist Jürgen Klauke.
Lukas Marxt’s video Black Rain White Scars (2014) captures a cityscape of Hong Kong in an unchanged camera shot—just as is it were a photographic snapshot. Yet very slowly, almost imperceptibly, over the course of the video the scenery changes when the poetic form of the storm of humanmade architecture of the metropolis is superimposed visually and acoustically.
Thomas Kutschker employs in his short film Die Grenze (The Border) (1999) several hundred photographs of the Berlin Wall taken by East German border troops for documentation purposes. The montage of this black-and-white photographs one after the other results in a minimalistic cinematic sequence in which an objective voice merely reads the brief archival entries on the location and number of the photograph.
Works
Maria Vedder: Blues für einen unbekannten Fotografen (1987)
Róbert Olawuyi: flickr.comment (2009)
Lukas Marxt Black: Rain White Scars (2014)
Thomas Kutschker: Die Grenze (1999)
![ELA EIS, Miracle Whip [Befreit], 1979](/sites/default/files/styles/custom_desktop_crop/public/media/images/2022-05/ELA%20EIS__Miracle%20Whip_Befreit_1.jpg?h=b8af9e64&itok=pQE-a5Fw "ELA EIS, Miracle Whip [Befreit], 1979")
