CAROLIN FÖRSTER

Zoe Leonard: Reading Traces: The Proximate

Photography is essential to Leonard as a medium of various classification principles, regardless of scientific, documentary, or private nature. The artist engages in analogue photography using small or medium format, and cameras like Leica or Rolleiflex (although the latter is not used in the case at hand, the series “Bubblegum”, 2000/03, but rather, for example, in the work “Analogue”, 1998– 2009). Her reduced sense of form—often frontal perspectives, over- head shots, or slightly perspectival representations, available light that is usually natural, consistent sharpness, a complete image detail rendered with a negative border—references nothing other than photography itself: “These are photographs. I want the viewer to be aware of that.”¹ Thus, Leonard pinpoints an understanding of photography, so widely discussed and challenged today, as a reflection of reality and as a document. Yet through her simple gesture of rendering Leonard does not conceal the quality of the image as artefact, which displays the touch of its creator and her own perspective on things. Her approach, therefore, is equivalent to “documentary style” in the sense of Walker Evans, uniting factual description of reality and authorial positing. Evans is also the perfect example of focusing on the overlooked and flouted vestiges of everyday life, which he started photographing in the early 1970s on the streets and in the gutters: rubbish, crown corks, and metal lids for cans pictured beyond the confines of elaborated studio aesthetics, as for instance Irving Penn was asserting with his still lifes of cigarette butts around the same time.

¹ “Zoe Leonard”, in Journal of Contemporary Art, 6 (Summer 1993), pp. 64–77; http://www.jca-online.com/leonard.html, accessed 11 May 2015. Author’s emphasis.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 130/2015, pp. 11–20.

WILLIAM L. FOX

The Center for Land Use Interpretation: The Nuclear Pictorial

CLUI is “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived”.¹ Its primary tools are road trips, aerial and ground-based documentary photography, and the extensive online Land Use Database. The work of CLUI has, in fact, helped prompt the archival and research turns in contemporary artistic practice. In part this is because, unlike the photo archives assembled by governments, CLUI’s images and information are presented in physical and online galleries, and in books with commentary by cultural geographers. The context is more a curated cabinet of landscape curiosities than a traditional land survey.

¹ See http://clui.org.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 130/2015, pp. 21–32.

JENS ASTHOFF

Philip Gaißer: Nests

The series [“Tester No. 1–11” (2010)] is an illustrative example of how Gaißer develops and more closely taps into nature and landscape photography in particular through sculptural or tectonic situations. One approach he takes involves immediate stagings, already evident in early photos like “Storm” (2007) or “o.T.” (Untitled, 2007), and in the title of the work group “Be a Sculpture for a Second” (2008), as well as in the highly sculptural motifs of the cycle “Rapid Construction” (2009–12), and of course also in “Tester”. In another case, Gaißer turns such a moment into an indirect staging, basically in the form of a found landscape: photographs of this type show actual or even just seemingly pure views of nature, while at the same time tending to harbour a moment of irritation that germinates upon second glance and in which the cultural and civilising interpenetration of the setting manifests. Gaißer’s photography usually reads such polysemous landscape characteristics in the sculptural sense of objets trouvés.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 130/2015, pp. 33–44.

LUIGI FASSI

Michael Höpfner: Photography as Shibboleth

Erosion, identity, memory, and dispersion are the key words in Michael Höpfner’s artistic investigations. Over the past years, the Austrian artist’s practice has focused on geographical and cultural wanderings, performed by crossing—through the slow pace of walking—a multitude of lands in various continents, from the mountainous regions of China and Tibet up to the countryside of Mediterranean Europe. Höpfner’s walks are never completely finished or over, once and for all. Rather, they are peripatetic entropies,where the artist returns to the same places after months or even years, revisiting traces and searching for more clues to his own unanswered questions. This practice of repeated returns to the same locations is a fundamental characteristic for Höpfner’s work, and it demonstrates how the act of walking, far from any episodic manifestation, becomes a theoretical and thought-provoking act, a tracing of uncertain paths which is followed by intuitions and uninterrupted activity.
In Höpfner’s artistic work, each act revolves around walking in a consequential way: preventative research, on-site exploration, the repetitive returning to the site of occurrence, and the photographing. The photo and installation materials made by the artist during his wanderings or in between his journeys in his studio in Europe do not intend to be a documentary archive of what has been observed, but are instead made up of theoretical gestures, crystallisations of thoughts, traces and notes of disorder. In fact, Höpfner does not promote order or exhaustive summaries. He does not establish logic or reportage—nor, in a word, map-making. On the contrary, the artist shows the landscape as entropy and enigma, constantly in search of a point of entry and understanding.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 130/2015, pp. 45–56.

CINENOVA FEMINIST FILM AND VIDEO DISTRIBUTOR

IRENE REVELL, KERSTIN SCHROEDINGER: Diffracted Landscapes

What does a feminist landscape look like? Or rather, how does a feminist look at landscape? What if our (point of) view is not a defining one? The landscapes we look at are not to be explored and occupied; but how does our gaze escape these tendencies? Teresa de Lauretis speaks about mechanisms of coherence: she espouses a fundamental suspicion towards narrativity and yet simultaneously argues for its re-articulation, in reference to the narrative strategies in Yvonne Rainer’s films.¹ “[F]eminist work in film should be not anti-narrative or anti-oedipal but … working, as it were, with and against narrative in order to represent not just a female desire …; but … the duplicity of the oedipal scenario itself and the specific contradiction of the female subject in it.”² This duplicity is meant to be specific in regard to the history of cultural forms and also the contexts of reception. In analogy we assume a suspicion towards narrativity transfers to a suspicion towards a 360-degree pan, a full panoramic picture, a panoptic control scan, amidst other mechanisms of (visual) coherence.

¹ Cinenova distributes “The Man Who Envied Women” (1985) and “Privilege” (1990) by Yvonne Rainer.
² Poetic, and Yvonne Rainer”, in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 108.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 130/2015, pp. 71–72.