SHINO KURAISHI

The Membrane of Cities and Architecture: Takashi Homma's Photographs

Among the enormous quantity of visual representations of urban Japan, “Tokyo Suburbia” (1998), a collection of photographs by Takashi Homma, is one of the most successful in accomplishing a clear historical cut. Many of Homma’s predecessors“ such as Shinya Fujiwara, who photographed the crime scenes of the so-called “Metal-bat Murder” and “An Elementary Schoolboy Murdered in Kobe”, and Norio Kobayashi, who studied the construction site of Tama New Town in the late 1980s have more or less regarded the suburb as a “new place” where history and origin are totally missing, a place where unsettled, temporary life is lived, an unspectacular site with vestiges of reclaimed wasteland and forest thickets, a peculiar space created between nature and artificiality. Even the important city photographers Daido Moriyama (see also Camera Austria 2/1980, p. 21 – 33) and Nobuyoshi Araki (see also Camera Austria 45/1993, p.14 – 49, and: Nobuyoshi Araki, Akt-Tokyo, 1971 – 1991), who choose subjects somewhat distant from the artificiality of suburbs, display roughly this same tendency. For Homma, in the meantime, a suburb has become nothing but a neutral everyday space that one can simply inhabit without needing to intervene with critical judgments. For him, beyond the “here and now” of the suburb, there is no other place that can be referred to as a “home” which one can return to. Even the nostalgic emotion of those who live and grow up in suburbs merely flows from “here” and back to “here”.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 77/2002, pp. 4–15.

JAN VERWOERT

The horse farm - a counterworld: On Alexandra Vogt's Photography

The excessive corporeality of the horse, in some cases exaggerated to the obscene, the uncomfortable physical feeling of injury or hurt conveyed both by the horse and the girl, or the blurring of boundaries between the animal and the human being in the games of dressing-up derived from rituals of grooming lend Alexandra Vogt’s photos a traumatic dimension. What is special is that although the pictures appear traumatic, they do not identify any specific trauma. This very lack of clarity amplifies their effect. Very similarly, psychoanalytical theory proceeds on the assumption that the psychological kernel of a trauma cannot be portrayed. Neither can a trauma be apprehended by means of reconstructing the real shock experience causing the traumatisation, nor can it be fathomed in the fantasies with which someone seeks to come to terms with his trauma. However, the failed attempt to describe the trauma may result in a moment of uncertainty – which Lacan calls the tuche, Barthes the punctum – that brings the trauma to light. Or something barely tangible that gives you the sense that something is wrong.
It is precisely these details and breaks that add traumatic density to Alexandra Vogt’s photos. The shimmering of the skin without make-up in the flashlight, the scabs on the forehead, the muscles of the horse’s flank, the stream of urine, the elements of real corporeality that contrast with the enactment of the photo, but equally the elements of visual overabundance evoked by the enactment, be it the silvery shine of a dancing shoe or the ornamental similarity of a horse’s blaze, a pattern on fabric and a bloodstain. In this way Alexandra Vogt describes a world in which imagination and reality overlap, in which the relationship to corporeality is (not yet) unambiguous and is lived out in a relationship with horses in a way that is at once asexual an sexual, thus implying a postponement and an anticipation of adulthood.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 77/2002, pp. 16–20.

MARTIN PRINZHORN

Manfred Willmann: Ideology Critique

The subject of the country(side) is one of the most difficult in contemporary art as it is either incapable of dialogue with the remaining, urban part of culture or is used by this mainstream culture merely as a projection surface for quite different yearnings and fears. Manfred Willmann’s photographs, taken over a period of many years, are a very conscious confrontation with these difficulties and do not even attempt to produce a simple, harmonious picture but, in their complexity, rather always provide food for thought on this topic that can never, however, be conceived in isolation, but rather, due to its constitutive role in any kind of cultural production, always equally embraces all of its conditions. Before discussing the works, I would like to make a few points concerning this peculiar and often mysterious subject.

The relation of modernism towards the country is complex and compromised. The reason is that the country, as a cultural entity, is a creation of modernism. The late eighteenth century saw a growing cultural awareness of the garden and the landscape, gradually widening the architectural and cultural sphere and driving back the wild, the unknown and the other. This change in perception takes place due to a tremendous psychologisation: landscape and nature become something like human beings, the projection on them is so strong and powerful that nature begins to feel and to speak to us. The result is that the country and nature increasingly come to be a stage upon which modern man can act out the play of his yearnings and fears.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 77/2002, pp. 29–32.

KRYSTIAN WOZNICKI

Rhetoric of loss of control

SIGN WARS

The supposed continuation of terror at the symbolic level has caused the birth of a useful bogeyman: primarily it absorbs any suspicion of manipulation that always gets raised in the course of the media war. In addition, it allows us to criminalize opponents of globalisation. As the Herald Tribune opined: “Even if their tactics are different in scale and in nature, there is a not entirely coincidental synergy between the actions of the terrorists and the aims of the anti-globalization forces.” This is paradoxical in that reducing the Jihad to a war of signs fails to mention that it was only possible to build up the terror organisation in the slipstream of economic globalisation. But the continuity of the event, as dealt with here, would suggest something different. As Cologne-based cultural scientist Tom Holert notes, regarding the phase of apocalyptic live pictures in the course of the second WTC collision, a “world of images that cannot be enacted or controlled, (…) lies beyond the realm of self-perception and procedures of the media.” So statements hitherto on the loss of control also bear witness to the fact that the media are still digesting the incisive event at the semiotic level.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 77/2002, pp. 41–46.

MANUEL OLVEIRA

Herman Asselberghs_Els Opsomer_Rony Vissers: Mondophrenetic TM., So, where are you coming from?

Herman Asselberghs, Els Opsomer and Rony Vissers focus their work on some of the contradictory aspects of the contemporary cultural system from the political, economic, sociological, philosophical and informational points of view. Combining their various facets as artists, writers, producers and graphic designers, both together and individually, they have become involved in projects such as “Lost Nation” or “Mondophrenetic?”. In these ventures, the exhibition space is transformed into a place for reflection on the links between contemporary artworks and technology, between culture and our identity, between the shapes of buildings and the financial decisions that produce them, between the utopian ideas of what could have been or what may be and the overwhelming realities of what is, between the history of representation and that of subjectivity. In short, they are concerned with the definition, construction and analysis of the complexity of some of the traits of our culture viewed from our most immediate environment.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 77/2002, pp. 47–54.

ROLF SACHSSE

BILD - HAUT - NETZ. Feuchte Fotografie: Schleimhaut und Blitz

Text feature in Camera Austria International 77/2002, p. 71.