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"Bathers"
2003/04 Lambdaprints mounted on Diasec, 80 x 120 cm
My photographic-artistic interest is to reflect upon the conditions of our perception of reality. Within the scope of several photographic book projects and exhibitions I have examined models of perception and explanations of the world by using different visual concepts and image rhetorics.
My actual project “Bathers” deals with the strong impact of printed pictures of „people bathing in water“. The cultural history of representations of swimmers/bathers reaches from antique mosaics to midieval book paintings, from the paintings of Cézanne and Matisse to contemporary pin-up photography.
I am using the redundant photographic representations of bathers, swimmers, splashers, which exclusively originate from touristic holiday- and wellness catalogues.
Our element of life - water - has to be recycled, and that is the way that I will act with these archetypes of paradise condensed to technical images. I am recycling the flashy colored patterns by re-photographing small sections of the printed photographs with small focus. Subsequently these negatives get digitalized and revised with an image software, with the result of nearly complete color-desaturated pictures.
The turquoise blue of the Aegean and Caribean Sea dilutes to a subliminal color haze, the horizon disappears. The result ia a big emptiness, interrupted only by sporadic bathing utensils, swell, shore and beach fragments. This emptiness, which afflicts the bathers mutated to nearly abstract points, gets divided by the original material’s print screen points, particularly made visible by the narrow focus.
Nearly pushed on to the boundary of „black and white“, these desaturated pictures totally lose their aggressive poster-like effect and literally fade away into abstract / concrete oscillation figures; into a visual noise. I am trying to intensify this noise, this redundancy: by only minimally varying the monotonous visual denominator.
According to sentences of the information theory the white noise seems to be the highest possible, the most komplex state of information. In my future work with photography and image media I want to dedicate to the artistic potential of this state of “white noise”
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