112 | 2010

RAINER FUCHS

Perception in Motion. On the Works of Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond

In Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond’s work, photography and film shed light on each other. While the photography uses series of images to undermine the static, unique nature of the individual picture, the film work is characterised by an approach that reflects on the pictorial-structural conditions of this medium of motion. The cinematic aspect of photography and the photographic aspect of film form the relational basis of an oeuvre that, in its turn, serves to represent transitions and instabilities, deliberately inverts accustomed spatial-visual orders, perplexes practised, internalised ways of seeing things, and thus spotlights and expounds the problems of perception.
Doing headstands and jumping in the air are well-tried ways in which to liberate the body from the normal state of its conventional grounding, to align it differently to its environment, and thus to change the appearance and perception of the environment. Anderwald + Grond placed themselves and others in unstable positions in several series of photos, with the aim of destabilising the view, focusing on the related dynamics, that goes beyond the bounds of the single moment, and its suspension in photography as mutually honing components.  […]
Anderwald + Grond focused once again on the theme of the water-mirror in order to destabilise clear-cut lines of demarcation of a landscape in the series of photos “Notes on a Coast” (2003 – 2007). In order to lose the ground beneath their feet and to assume a precarious floating position, from where familiar orders and conceptions of space begin to waver, the two artists went into the sea of Israel’s Mediterranean coast with their camera. In this way they convey “not a mere perception of motion, but a perception in motion […] a moving-oneself […] that not only changes, but generates places […]”. The photographs display this generation of a place in the obvious visual deviation from its actual reality, for now the water appears to overflow the shore, devouring it along with its hotel buildings. The familiar idyllic tourist equilibrium of sun, sand and sea is thus turned upside down, and the general perceptive and existential components become socio-politically charged by the specific topography and history of the place. From a perspective where the water is proverbially up to your neck, it seems reasonable to assume dark scenarios in these pictures that refer to “the latent threat to a people for decades in a situation that has not always been as war but never as peace. Seen from Europe the waves break against this country like projections that are centred on Israel.” “Notes on a Coast” demonstrates unobtrusively that perception is always also bound to contexts of reception history and iconology/ideology and is thus also in a constant state of flux.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 112/2010, pp. 13–22.

WALTER SEIDL

For a memorising appropriation of images: On the works of Šejla Kamerić

For the Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić, the question of artistic productivity, of reasons and models for images, and the question as to their forms and modes of representation is always linked to events of contemporary history that the artist experienced at first hand and that she incorporates in her work in the form of remembered fragments. Factual knowledge and subjective experience are two ever-present aspects in her work between which she maintains a constant tension. […]

In most of Kamerić’s works, personal fates, some of them linked to the artist’s own biography, become ontological patterns of self-identification. The dividing line between life and death that the artist experienced among her own family and friends is expressed partly directly, partly indirectly in Kamerić’s works. Traumatic events such as the destruction of Sarajevo library in 1992 and the death of her father in the Bosnian War in 1993 put the relationship to current moral and socio-political topics into perspective. Losing numerous friends and relatives has led the artist to raise the question of the existential, rather than the material value of things. The artist’s visualisation of events by means of the photographic dispositif is founded on a documentation of real circumstances that subsequently transport symbolic aspects. […]

The importance of Kamerić’s works is due mostly to their link to recent history, namely the events of the Balkan War at the end of the twentieth century. She often takes them as starting points to transfer the subjective moments of media representation to layers of artistic images in which personal socialisation and memory play a key role. Her use of different artistic media is based upon the transfer of photographic elements into the construction of plot lines. Historical fields of meaning serve Kamerić as the basis for creating narrative components in which the role and function of female characters is mainly to the fore, so as to fill those voids left when considering individual fates.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 112/2010, pp. 23–34.

MERCEDES VICENTE

On the works of Ann Shelton

In 2001 Ann Shelton (born 1967 in Timaru, New Zealand) began the photographic series “Public Places”, linked to sites of crime and trauma. These photographs revisit places where ill-fated events have – actually or purportedly – occurred, and which have become the source of popular myths and fictional accounts. The titles of the photographs reference films and novels that fictionalised these events. Examples are the site where New Zealand teenagers Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker murdered Parker’s mother in 1954, a case brought to the screen by Peter Jackson in “Heavenly Creatures” (1994); the road north of Daytona Beach in Florida where Aileen Wuornos – a former prostitute executed in 2002 for killing seven men and whose story became the basis for the movie “Monster” (2003) – disposed of the body of the first man she killed; or the Seacliff Asylum where one of New Zealand’s foremost writers Janet Frame was a patient, whose autobiography is the basis for Jane Campion’s film “An Angel at My Table” (1990). Some of the concerns and issues of this particular series have a continuing relevance in Shelton’s practice today and have been further examined in recent works such as her series “Room, Room” (2008). […]
The banal content of Shelton’s straight, deadpan “late” photographs reveals nothing of the disquieting narratives implicit to them, which may reach us from outside the photograph via an amalgam of news, myths and fictional recollections. Their titles are no more than markers or succinct captions naming locations. The open-ended nature of these photographs leaves the viewer to imagine or project onto these photographs the occurrence of the event. Their effectiveness (and by the same token, their potential failure) relies precisely on the fact that they say very little themselves; their very muteness is somehow uncontaminated by the noise of media, and unlike the latter, their mnemonic agency is found in this capacity to remain open.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 112/2010, pp. 35–43.

MERCEDES VICENTE

On the works of Mark Adams

Mark Adams’ (born 1949 in Christchurch, New Zealand) documentary approach has several things in common with Ann Shelton’s practice, especially in the attention to sites and the testimonial stance. Adams sees the medium of photography as one that ought to bear witness. He has adopted a documentary photographic practice that counters the longstanding traditions of colonial and ethnographic photography, and uses photography to question the inherent narratives of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s colonial history. Well aware of his position as a Pakeha (non-indigenous New Zealander) photographer and of the ethnological archive, and critical of any modernist assumptions, Adams’ intention has been to “turn the camera around 180 degrees” and for “the work to be about the settler culture and its relationships with specific Polynesians or Māori in specific regions or places: not about Māori, or natives, or others.”
In 1978 Adams began two projects, which were to develop in parallel and inform one another, and from which the concerns and issues that have marked his practice up to the present evolved. The first was a photographic series of the carvings of Tene Waitere (1854 – 1931) at Whakarewarewa and other public places in Rotorua, commissioned by the local museum. The series addresses New Zealand’s postcolonial history and is seminal to an ongoing body of work around sites and landscapes that has resulted in works such as “Lands of Memories” (1993) and “Cook’s Sites” (1999).The second, his first encounter with the culture of tatau (Samoan tattooing) in a suburb of Auckland, when a magazine asked him to do photographs to accompany an article on pe’a (Samoan full body male tattoo), initiated his three-decade project of tatau photography. This initial encounter confronted Adams with a set of cross-cultural issues that clashed with his early assumptions about the constituted exotic other. For Adams this raised questions about the still unacknowledged historical and cultural identity and position of New Zealand within Polynesia, before post-colonial studies came into vogue. It also brought to light the process of representing others and the contestable implications of the medium of photography in the history of colonialism and in the colonial photographic archive.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 112/2010, pp. 43–51.

FOUAD ASFOUR

Silences and Gaps. Reflections on the work of the South African photographer Ernest Cole

Ernest Cole was born in 1940 as Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole in Eesterust, a Black township on the outskirts of Tshwane, South Africa. Cole started with photography when he was 14 years old1, and decided to leave high school after finishing his second year in 1956 in order to avoid the low standard of Bantu Education. He finished his schooling by correspondence and then took up a photography correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography. In 1958, Cole started working for a number of newspapers and magazines and decided by 1964, four years after the Sharpeville massacre and just after the Rivonia Trials, to compile a book with photographs of South African Black life at that time, similar to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s People of Moscow. After photographing in many places and different regions, he left South Africa with a mock-up of the planned book entitled House of Bondage. The photographic agency Magnum arranged for the publication of the book by Ridge Press2 in 1967, resulting in Cole’s immediate ban from South Africa. […]Cole produced a comprehensive overview of aspects of Black life in South Africa under apartheid – in prisons, hospitals, mines, schools, documenting crime and policing in the urban areas and the appalling living conditions of the Black majority. His photography avoids being sensationalist though. He captures the daily lives of the oppressed Black people with an awareness for social and psychological contradictions and an acute sense for the background and the objects which surround the people he is documenting. Words and graphic design play an important role in his photographs – company logos or advertisement slogans are included in the backgrounds of most of his shots, signifying an urban life determined by the capitalist order of the White settlers.
By not documenting key political moments and figures of resistance, his photographs could be seen as structurally analysing the mechanism of apartheid laws. He exposes the effects of these laws, which continue to affect post-apartheid South African every-day life, such as power structures and interpersonal relations between White employers and Black workers.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 112/2010, pp 69–71.