MICHAEL WETZEL

Photography as a Craft and as Mythology. Thomas Demand’s “Zeigzeugenschaften”

(…) By building the objects of his pictures, Demand’s photos, in the Platonic sense, suggest a higher value of truth, and we may speak of a progressive distillation of truth. In the beginning there is the wealth of pictures that the artist takes from the collective databases of the mass media or his mental store of memory and which always refer to a place marked by a particular event. This event may be of a historical nature – such as photographic documents, e. g. pictures of the Führer headquarters after the bomb attack against Hitler as a model for “Room” (1994), press photos of the hotel room in which Barschel’s body was found as a model for “Bathroom”, or pictures of ransacked Stasi rooms, echoed in “Office” – or commonplaces such as the architectural style of the post-war era in “Staircase”, “Balconies” or “Garages”. Demand condenses these representations into a typological image or – in the words of Kant – a schema of the places, certainly a virtual image of the topos (in the double sense of real, existing place and the metaphorically significant manner of speaking) that does not exist and that he literally develops by creating himself the scene that it is intended to portray.
Demand’s photography is reproduction of reproduction that becomes production of invented scenes, as a mise-en-abyme of the photographic element by using the very photographic base materials, i. e. card and paper, for his models. To make another allusion to Roland Barthes, who referred to the photographic trace as emanation of the referent, inversely – certainly still in the spirit of Plato – we may speak of the referent as emanation of the photo. But from this it follows that the plastic simulacra of the real are still only surface, despite their sculptural three-dimensionality underscored by the artist, a surface that is by merit of the materiality of card peculiarly lustreless and monochrome.
It is the opacity of eliminated traces of a life that has left these spaces or which has not yet entered them as sterile models of an ideal reality. Hence the dead, frozen appearance of the pictures, the technical coldness of the media simulation of a pure world of the inorganic, a world of the photographic that is made up of silver and salt. We might liken it to the Wonderland created by Lewis Carroll and its manifestations mocking the physical laws of reality, whose invention is also due to the author’s inspiration by the new photographic dispositive he so passionately explored. But closer still is a comparison with the photographs of Eugène Atget, whose pictures of a deserted Paris were said by Benjamin to remind him of police photographs of a crime scene.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 5–9.

RUEDI WIDMER

Thomas Demand: Building the Scene of Crime. An interview by Ruedi Widmer

RUEDI WIDMER: Let’s begin at the beginning. To begin with it is an everyday place. Something happens …

THOMAS DEMAND: … and this is something that is tabooed or condemned in society…

WIDMER: … an act …

DEMAND: … exactly, an act. And this act is expelled from its everyday context because it doesn’t belong there. Because it produces something that influences society; because it is beyond the bounds of the general run of events.

WIDMER: Then along comes someone and takes a picture.

DEMAND: To begin with, the photographer ascertains that this is a scene. That there is an interest in investigating this place. He recognises the distance to banality and is really the first person to change the place, somehow turning it into a mythological site. Then the whole chain of virtualisations gets going. For example, if you look at the tunnel that Diana died in, it’s interesting that no one has a film of the inside of the tunnel in his mind, but only of the outside. Everyone only has both ends of the tunnel in his mind, but there’s no film in between. And that’s exactly what I’m interested in, finding this kind of non-existent images – images that look just like the images that do exist. That is what I call the third surface. It’s not the banal place, nor the arguments about how things happened, but rather what lodges in our memories and develops a life of its own as a myth.

WIDMER: The result is a place that we can no longer separate from its images. A specific point in reality overgrown with photos and films, a cluster of fantasies. The projections and the images are what actually create the »act« in all its importance.

DEMAND: We connect places like this with our own memories. Everyone knows the bathroom that Barschel died in. But no one has perceived it as a place, but rather only as part of his own chain of images. The aim of my work is to investigate into these chains. If we consider the Barschel picture, it was the first reproduction that caused a big scandal. People started asking whether it should be printed at all. Whether a photographer should be allowed to intrude and take a picture before the police have arrived. Much later, the untiring public prosecutor in Schleswig-Holstein re-examined the unresolved questions, on the basis of the photos. Among other things, it had to do with the shoes on the bath-mat that curiously never appeared on the published photos. That means, the photo medium runs through the whole affair.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 10–16.

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN

Photography and Remembrance: Feldmann, RAF, Schlick, Kippenberger etc.

Remembrance is fated to remain a totally abstract notion until we have mourned for someone so long that all that remains is to commemorate him. Lately, just in time for the fin de siècle, remembrance has increasingly often been featured in connection with (symbolic) politics, visual culture, and the tasks of art in the discussion. Meanwhile, several books have been published that focus on remembrance of the dead and which I feel approach this issue from both angles. These books are about dead people whom for various reasons we have a stronger wish to commemorate than is usually the case with organised remembrance. Who would not say that this is first and foremost a private matter? A key argument opposing the Holocaust monument, often incorporated in reactionary discourses, runs along similar lines. Has the generation that once fought on many fronts to make the private sphere public, to make the public interest in the private sphere identifiable, or to deliver up the organised private sphere to the public sphere, now come to a point where it once again wrests the end from the (or at least a false) private sphere?

In recent decades, two camps had dislodged remembrance from the peaceful routine of caring for war graves and Sunday visits to the cemetery. In the eighties, many young people under thirty had already lost more than a hundred friends, acquaintances and lovers as a result of the aids crisis. The youth of lost friends and the political aspect of their suffering and death demanded a new way of dealing with their death and commemorating the deceased. Based on this contradiction of grieving and political activity, Douglas Crimp, for example, developed approaches that linked this general problem with its particular manifestations in visual culture and symbolic politics and their common features at the rhetorical level in his famous essay Mourning and Militancy.
On the other hand, we see that German refoundation is aspiring to accomplish a certain momentum or symbolic-psychological exoneration by means of settling, suspending, deferring, modifying or aestheticizing remembrance of the Jews murdered by the Germans. However, it is not sufficient to reject this sinister notion of the captains of the Berlin Republic, the Left – or whoever else might be opposed to this trend – is faced with the problem of having to consider for themselves how to deal with the complex issue of remembering German responsibility – aesthetically, politically, educationally, etc. This exposes us to a number of unpleasant questions and compels us to reappraise the way we see ourselves from the other side in terms of the way we deal with some implicit certainties of being left-wing. Including the noisome question of leftist responsibility that cannot be restricted to reappraising the – naturally justified and necessary – issue of left-wing anti-Semitism.
But I am only marginally interested in this question in this context. While I do see that the general problem of the Holocaust monument is that such a monument should on the one hand relate to political efforts which, by their own definition, are aimed at preventing something of this kind from ever happening again, i. e.: antiracist, antinational political movements, struggles, laws – and, above and beyond that: ideas, writings and discourses that have evolved with a view to achieving this objective; on the other hand, such an abstract technical definition of remembrance geared to an objective – that is naturally right, yet remote and extrinsic to remembrance – may well hinder, if not utterly thwart, this aim as a mode of contemplation and recollection. While, in addition to this problem, I also see the following paradox for a radical left-wing position, that one purpose of a state monument should always be to contribute to the failure of the state to portray itself as a complete »Germany«, a built and approved monument will also always contribute to the success of the symbol “Germany” for Germany, whereas a monument that is not built will allow oblivion and suppression to prevail – if I consider all these difficulties, the examples at issue are more obvious, more solvable tasks from our immediate environment. This is equally precarious. The books in question are Die Toten 1967 – 1993 by Hans-Peter Feldmann (about the people who died as a result of the student movement, APO, Baader-Meinhof, June 2 movement, revolutionary cells, RAF, …) and Martin (about Martin Kippenberger) by Wolfgang Bauer, Jörg Schlick and Peter Weibel.

In addition to the two major discussions of remembrance, these reflections focus on a medium that differs greatly from the other media of public remembrance in its closeness and intimacy, photography. The fact that every photo showing a person will one day show a dead person is a prerequisite of every portrait. However negligibly, this prerequisite always also influences the photographer”s decisions to photograph people. Alongside many other intentions of recording, composing, representing, alienating and exaggerating that may go into an artist”s or photographer”s decision, there is always the intention connected with the mortality of the individuals portrayed. For this reason, it is necessary to single out, emphasise and amplify certain aspects and to relate them to other transiences, possibly far more fleeting elements of the scenario in which mortal humans are standing or walking around. There are also gradual mortalities such as an old person who loses his good skin but still lives on.
Traditionally, this relation of photography to death and the dead has been interpreted in two ways. One was rather focused on the “social custom” of this closeness to death. Photo albums as archives of transiences: What and who is worth remembering, what people, what moments. How do we present this booty wrested from entropy and demise, where do we hang our ancestors” pictures, what frame do we use for pictures of our children? What backgrounds and poses, what clothes, what occasion? And finally: What photographic styles do we choose for these tasks, what technical means. And, then, how does the illegitimate art of amateur photography evolve from these tasks of preservation and representation. What groups of society emancipate themselves in this art and with which artistic decisions now “liberated” from the ritual tasks of family photography. This aspect of society”s coming to terms with its past by means of photography has been described, for example, in the standard work Eine illegitime Kunst published by Pierre Bourdieu et al. – even though the aspect of remembrance and veneration of the dead features only implicitly.
And yet just as we can engage in sociology with regard to the denotative component of photography and with the general agreement that every person shown in a photograph corresponds to an empirical, mortal human being, we may also regard the appearance of and living with this convention from a “phenomenological” angle. Seminal treatises on the theory of photography define it as a possibility of communicating with the dead, of “looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor” as Roland Barthes noted while looking at a photograph of Napoleon”s brother. Among other things, the phenomenologist is interested in what follows from the fact that we can look at dead people in past times like and as living people in photographs, on the one hand in terms of our general perception and, on the other, in terms of production of photography.
Today, this at least one-sided communication with the dead and the living as future deceased is badly disturbed. As a result of this permanent presence of long-dead stars in the photos of mass culture and iconised historical film and photo images with no particular people but with instantly recognisable historical content, we have grown accustomed to detaching people, in photos and recognisable past in pictures from real people and real historical situations, and thus precisely from the world of mortals. Pictures are historical data like the data conveyed by abstract characters. The recipients are required to perform an additional activity, to read them again in close relation to the people and objects they portray.
The bridge between the mortal person and the relatively immortal representation must first be laboriously restored by means of recollections. This laboriousness linked with intimacy feels something like it must have been like to see biblical history or indeed the religious content itself in religious genre pictures, and to realise as a pious person that you are, for example, seeing Jesus and he is seeing you.
Above all, it requires a particular awareness of the specific irretrievability, transience and the special value of a quality of a mortal to put oneself back in this state of wonderment in which one is amenable to the feeling of crossing a border that the living were never permitted to cross. This, then, is the living face of what is meanwhile a dead person. Roland Barthes had taken photographs of his dead mother as a starting point for such investigation. The two photo books involved here also ensure this awareness.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 17–28.

VRÄÄTH ÖHNER

On Seeing, Flying and Dreaming. "dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" by Johann Grimonprez

In his anthropological investigation of cinema, Edgar Morin compares the development of cinema with that of the aeroplane. Both have conquered the continents; but while the aeroplane “fulfilled the most nonsensical dream pursued by mankind since he first beheld the sky: to break free of the Earth”, cinema accomplished the exact opposite, namely “directly to reflect earthly reality”. “While the aeroplane moved away from the world of objects, the cinematographer’s prime aim was to reflect this world in order to be able to scrutinise it more closely.”
The point of Morin’s little story about a historical coincidence is that the aeroplane and cinema soon came to swap roles. Due to its usefulness, the aeroplane obediently fitted in to the world of machines and became an expedient instrument for travel, trade and warfare. Film, on the other hand, “rose up into a sky of dreams, (…) populated by adorable figures who had fled earthly reality, whose servant and mirror it evidently had been planned to be.”
Of course, this story does not tell us the whole truth, it fails to mention the links that film has had and still has with trade and war, for example. It is a falsifying tale whose sole purpose is to present familiar facts from an unaccustomed perspective. But according to Friedrich Nietzsche, this perspectivism is the last possibility of truth left to us because, by merit of its apparent narrowness, it at least preserves us from the greatest illusion of all, namely that such a thing as objective or universal truths exists at all.
Johan Grimonprez follows an analogous structural principle in “dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y”, although the objects of his examination are slightly different: film has been replaced by television, the aeroplane has been replaced by the air disaster, and the dream is embodied, at least for a while (under the conditions of the Cold War), in the figure of the terrorist who occupies television and the aeroplane alike. Today, in the terms of the history proposed by “dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y”, we are now in a completely different situation again: there are bombs that explode without warning, bombs that various political liberation movements claim to have planted (Lockerbie), and there are honeymoon couples who film plane crashes by pure chance. The observers have become individualised (they get invited to the news studio by CNN), while the culprits have become collectivised (no face, just a name to represent their movement), and the victims have become massed (today we only count them but forget about their individual fates) – these are the bench marks of a history that cannot yet be related because it is our contemporary history. If this history is related one day, then it will be on condition that these bench marks will have changed again, derived from what we regard as history today.
But seeing into the future is not the name of Grimonprez’ game, but quite simply seeing. Seeing what we get when we join together what was previously unconnected. (…) When Grimonprez assembles a chronology of hijacks on the basis of television images in “dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y”, we see that they show us almost nothing at all, or rather, what we see are the gaps and spaces that the television image masks because it is simultaneous with the occurrence of the event, spaces in which it cannot be further developed.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 29–30.

HANS-ULRICH OBRIST

Interview with Johan Grimonprez

HANS-ULRICH OBRIST: The taboo of visible death is usually kept from public sphere into private realm. “dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y” evokes Holbein’s sarcophagus painting where the viewer is both inside and outside, the active and passive view coincide. Allegorical death and death as a dumb fact. We are inside and outside, there is the obsession with death in “dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y” (You elsewhere described TV’s complicity with death as “the desire we have for the ultimate disaster is one aspect of our relationship with death”). In your text “Kobarweng or where is your helicopter” you write: “The observer observed”.

JOHAN GRIMONPREZ: Virilio remarked once that television turned the world into an accident, and that with the advent of virtual reality the whole of reality will be accidented. Each technology invents its own catastrophe, and with it a different relationship to death. The boat invented the sinking of the boat, the airplane invented the crash of the airplane, just as television has reinvented the way we perceive reality and the way we relate to catastrophe, history and death. TV has turned our notions of private and public inside out, but more importantly the representational modes for portraying actuality and imagination have become intertwined: CNN borrows from Hollywood and vice versa. The everyday talk show has zapped the family away from the coach right on TV and in the opposite direction catastrophe culture invades our living room. The territory of the home overlaps with the space of TV in a much more profound and psychological way than we are possibly aware. In that respect the gap between spectator and history has been narrowed totally. “dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y” ends also with a scene of a hijacked, crashing plane accidently framed on camcorder by honeymooners. They’re immediately invited to host Larry King’s talk show on CNN to tell how they were able to shoot the footage. The dynamics of abstract capitalism had already turned the revolutionary hijacker into an anonymous suitcase bomb, push-button history now turns the spectator into historian. The spectator has become the hero and political issues are simply reduced to explanations of how to operate a camcorder. Mellencamp calls it the shift from catastrophe to comedy: “We can’t change the world, but we can change our socks,” according to a Nike ad: “It’s not a shoe, it’s a revolution.”

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 41–43.

MAIA DAMIANOVIC

Interview mit Joachim Koester

MAIA DAMIANOVIC: It has often been said that your work plays the border between event and document, reality and artifice. Does the tension between the real and the fictitious in your work function as a deliberate rhetoric?

JOACHIM KOESTER: I do accent that border, but that’s only one way of putting it. My works are rhetorical in one sense, but they are also very emotional experiences that allow for a development of narrative. When you depict something, no matter how, as an artist you run into the problem of dealing with or using form. The merger of fiction and reality is just one of these. In the earlier work my idea was to say two things at once, and in that sense it was a merger, not only between the fictional and the real, but also between representation and the represented, or dramatizing and documenting, or chaos and control, as in the photos of Christiania. I tried to create a frame or structure that would allow the viewer and myself greater freedom within the image. I tried to show how an image is constructed, and also tell something through it. In structuring the work, I tried to find the image that was the most picturesque, the most cinematic, the most real and that was most ambiguous. Right now for a new project, a film made in collaboration with the artist and filmmaker Mathew Buckingham, we are both writing voice overs that will end up coming together as a collage. This is how I would like to describe my process, I want to leave space for something unknown.

MAIA DAMIANOVIC: In the “Day for Night, Christiania 1996” series you photographed the site through a bluish filter, the so called day for night technique made famous by the title of Francois Truffaut’s film, lending the rather banal scenery an uncanny, phosphorescent mystery. It seems to me that a significant function of the fictional-real interplay in your work is to isolate and dramatize the visibility of images and situations, and thereby call the viewer’s attention to what they see in a more self-aware way. Do you see yourself as a new generation situationalist?

JOACHIM KOESTER: I would like my images to be critical in pursuing ideas about perception and about how narrative is generated. A reflective approach, used exclusively, can be extremely heavy handed, but reflectivity together with dramatization can expose the construction and the structure of the image, and what is behind it, and at the same time elicit an emotional response from a viewer. In an early in-situ installation, “Rocent / Dawn of the Dead,” I installed an audio track that intertwined excerpts from a horror movie sound-track with sounds I taped at the site, the Rocent shopping mall, near Malmo in Sweden. So there was a pretty seamless mixture of the typical screams and eerie music from a horror movie, as well as normal sounds, like muzak from the shopping mall. I would call this a framing of the image, since this merger helps us recognize the layers that are put into an image. This has been done by a lot of people like Godard or Chris Marker, but I think there is still a space for dramatizing the visual in connection with two things: making the structure transparent, to some extent exposing the framing of the image while proposing a narrative. Although I don?t think there is anything new in the approach of showing the means, I think it does create a freedom for the spectator and for myself. The Christiania photos contain a truth in that they speak about how they are made, they speak about their own artifice. At the same time they are very engaging.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 44–47.

CATSOU ROBERTS

Joachim Koester: Blue Haze: Images from a Recent Dream

As a site, as well as a social phenomenon, Christiania is by turns seductive and repellent. Three decades after its inception in 1971 when Slumstormers squatted the abandoned military base Bådsmandsstrædes Kaserne near the center of Copenhagen, Christiania continues to offer itself up as a tangle of contradictions. Many visitiors to the self-proclaimed autonomous territory would find it impossible to conclusively pronounce the social experiment either a success or a complete failure. Anyone sympathetic with the original Utopian drive behind the community will fervently seek evidence of a better, happier (more utopic) existence afforded by the “alternative” lifestyle. So, never mind the expansive piles of detritus which greet the visitor at the entrance to Christiania. Never mind the filthy, grotesquely malformed dogs (an incestuous “breed” unique to the territory) inclined to rub up against you, because a little further on there are grassy foot paths, well-tended gardens and quaint cottages.(…)
But this way of looking at a place in squared-off images necessarily implies a fracturing and fragmentation of the site’s reality. It is to see fluid reality as a series of freeze frames. While Joachim Koester has no interest in presenting an idealized vision of Christiania (scores of documentary films and reportages about the community have seen to that) he offers a version of the territory that, similarly, is composed of images that patch together an alternate “version”.
Koester’s photographic installation “Day for Night, Christiania 1996” presents a sketchy panorama of the site. The titles which he attributes to each individual photograph in the series reflect the multiple “realities” possible in regard to Christiania: These are dyadic titles that make simultaneous reference to Christiania’s former identity as a 17th century military base and to its later reincarnation as a “free city” in the 1970s. Titles such as “The Milkyway / Officers Quarters”, “Pusherstreet / Canteen #2”, “The Lotus House / Copper Mill”, or “The Peace Ark / Barracks” reveal the dual identity of certain areas that retain traces of their previous function, despite having been rechristened with appropriately utopic-sounding names. Koester’s images reveal that rather than obliterating the earlier structures, the new inhabitants of Christiania recycled the buildings and merely grafted any needed additions onto the existing architecture. Throughout the photographs, we see evidence of jerrybuilt structures clinging to fortified building walls like cancerous growths. These precarious structures – balconies, patios, and kiosks – contribute, like everything else at Christiania, to the sense of simultaneous decay and redevelopment. Fixed in a state of arrested development, the community is nevertheless continuously transforming. The force of entropy is evident in the endless examples of forsaken building projects, and often it is unclear whether or not these were demolition jobs, or whether the very building materials intended for construction have deteriorated from neglect.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 48–57.

FERDINAND SCHMATZ

Constanze Ruhm: Umgesetzte Gebung

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, p. 58.

CHRISTA BLÜMLINGER

Constanze Ruhm: Das Trauma feststellen

In a scene from Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague” the camera moves along the façade of a night-illuminated villa, pauses briefly at its corner, and then mirrors its way back again to the starting point and the couple, Delon – Giordana. On its way back, the camera follows the movements of the housemaid, who puts out all the lamps, one by one. The travelling here takes place within the materiality of its own movement: The covering up and putting out of one window image after the other assumes the pose of the slow unfolding of a filmstrip in the projector. In this journey, the camera disregards the two main characters for several minutes to compose the movement of an apparently irrelevant sequence: vanishing, reappearing, slipping out anew. From the start, the history of the Godardian lovers registers this characterization of withdrawal. Concerning such movements, Godard says that, like Ophüls, he shifts them into the center in order to accentuate an essential silence.
Constanze Ruhm’s recent video, “Travelling,” adopts precisely this symptomatic movement taken from “Nouvelle Vague” to conceptually present its function within a virtual space. Only a few pieces of furniture remain visible in Ruhm’s three-dimensional journey along the façade and– as in the apartment of her first Godard video study – the human figures are missing altogether. The difference between the two movements through virtual spaces lies in the fact that in “Travelling” we are dealing with a journey that measures the space in, analogous with the film, a “mechanical” and uninterrupted movement. By contrast, “Apartment” appears not as an anthropomorphous gaze, yet corresponds in its direction – changing and returning with white “fade-ins” of cinematic rhythmicization through subjectives and alternate takes. In “Apartment,” Ruhm is concerned with the central and overlong sequence from “Le Mépris” in which Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli portray a couple who are about to split up. If the subjectives assigned to the two characters are interrupted by a kind of virtual visual focus in the Godardian sequence, then only to present the spatial separateness of the two bodies that continuously move about a labyrinthine apartment. Constanze Ruhm radicalizes this Godardian mise-en-scène by applying the virtual, unshared, outer gaze of Bardot’s body and makes it dependant on its positions and movements. The characters no longer disappear – as they do in film – into the frame or out of the frame; they are also no longer measures of spatial representation. All that remains of the body of Bardot / Camille in this emptied virtual space is a mere trace of movement – in the same way that the trace of film bodies in “Travelling” can only be guessed via the changing focus.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, p. 59.

MAREN LÜBBKE

The Logic of the Obliterated Moment. Constanze Ruhm interviewed by Maren Lübbke

MAREN LÜBBKE: Your works – both the videos and your photographs – emerge in response to cinematic material. Why is the film important as referent, though it’s no longer identifiable in the work itself?

CONSTANZE RUHM: I gather information from which I develop a kind of metainformation, only to then allow it to vanish in the work. That is, I work uninterruptedly against myself – counterproductive. When I use a film scene for an image, nearly all the information arising from the scene is eliminated, leaving only the architecture or lighting conditions – apparent formal aspects that are not purely formal visually. This disposition serves me as film stock for another story, which is laid over an existing one.

MAREN LÜBBKE: What are the kind of stories that interest you?

CONSTANZE RUHM: There’s a kind of collective memory of images that are familiar to everyone and suggestive of private experiences. These images spring from a commonly accessible reservoir that interests me: It supplies us with technical imagery, photography, TV, and cinema – including the stories we grew up with that were molded from them. I try to establish specific patterns and to grasp these structures both individually and superindividually at the same time. I don’t see my pictures as photos of specific, subjective memory devices, but rather as that which releases them, their triggers. It’s also about something like a synopsis of dispositives that arrange themselves via visual constructions. Although no one really knows these places, I describe, there’s still this kind of weird familiarity …

MAREN LÜBBKE: You are concerned, then, to exploit the human visual memory, which does not necessarily have to relate to anything that has ever actually been seen, but that is available and, therefore, reality-constituted. We know of course that film is a means of fictionalization, but also that film equally affects our perceptions of reality, or rather establishes reality for us. This also applies to the level of emotions that the film establishes and which is experienced as real.

CONSTANZE RUHM: I work within this interspace of construction and emotion. These two elements are constitutive to my work, because I don’t merely wonder how pictures are constructed, rather also how emotions may be constructed. Why is a film that I actually find bad still able to bring me to tears? It’s this perfidious mechanism of transference that interests me. The patient is able to know about his suffering without being able to influence it.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 60–72.

ROLF SACHSSE

Marginalien zur bundesdeutschen Fotografie

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 73–75.

WOLFGANG VOLLMER

Referenzen

Text feature in Camera Austria International 66/1999, pp. 76–77.