70 | 2000

JACOB GROOT

Gerald van der Kaap: What we are doing

(…) The first point is to see the persons in my imagination, contemplating and meditating in detail the circumstances surrounding them, and I will then draw some spiritual profit from this scene. I will picture in my mind a man whom I have never seen or known, and whom I consider to possess the greatest perfection in the office and state of life which he occupies. I shall observe the same role of behaviour which I consider to be most perfect for him. (…)
(Source: The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, 1533)

(…) Now I say that man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will: he must in all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be viewed at the same time as an end. (…) The practical imperative will therefore be as follows: Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end. We will now consider whether this can be carried out in practice. (…)
(Source: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant, 1785)

(…) Everyone follows his own trade, you will tell me, and I say the same. Only, he must follow it with his whole soul, must not stifle every power in him that does not precisely accord with his official designation, must not, with this niggardly anxiety, literally and hypocritically be only what he is called; let him be what he is, earnestly, lovingly, then a spirit lives in all that he does; and if he is forced into an occupation in which the spirit may not live, let him cast it off with scorn and learn to plow! … For were they but modest, these people, did they but not make themselves a law unto the better among them! (…) And woe for the stranger who journeys in love and comes to such a people and three times woe for him who comes to such a people as I came, driven by great grief, a beggar as I was a beggar! (…)
(Source: Hyperion, Friedrich Hölderlin, 1797)

(…) The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmated by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view. (…)
(Source: A Theory of Justice, John Rawls, 1971)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 70/2000, pp. 17–28.

SVEN LÜTTICKEN

Thomas Ruff: The Art of Anachronism

Thomas Ruff’s photography has often given cause for historical comparisons and for tracing down points of reference in the history of photography. Such endeavours have become more and more complex in the nineties: it became increasingly clear that it is not sufficient to link Ruff with Albert Renger-Patzsch, Walker Evans or August Sander, for example, through his teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, thus placing him in a tradition of “realistic” photography. While this view was an expedient way of legitimising Ruff’s photography in the late eighties, the difference between historical comparisons and the assumption of an unproblematic historical continuity threatened to become blurred. From today’s vantage point, it is obvious that Ruff’s work is not tied to one particular tradition. It comprises a host of historical references that intertwine with each other in complex, sometimes contradictory ways. Ruff’s work has a mostly subliminal element of appropriation: (…) Mostly, however, Ruff does not recycle any particular images, but rather appropriates certain image forms at the generic level. He is not interested in simply making these images topical: rather, Ruff’s intentional anachronisms would seem to challenge new developments. (…)

The fact that Ruff has become a painter by fiddling about with porn pictures from the Internet, is an irony of photo history: after all, all the classical photographers of the twenties and thirties, once referred to as Ruff’s artistic ancestors (from Renger-Patzsch to Walker Evans and August Sander) share their disdain of the »painterly« photography of an artist like Alfred Stieglitz, who sought to achieve “impressionistic coherence” in his prints. Ruff’s new works can be seen as a revival of this long-discredited style of photography; the revenge of painting on modern photography anxious to maintain its purity. However, these »painterly« prints consist of grids that appear abstract if you focus on details as demonstrated by Ruff’s series of pictures for this issue. Again Ruff proves that his manner of dealing with the past does not stem from an unshakeable tradition; rather, his work is constantly drawing its power from different origins, from new anachronisms.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 70/2000, pp. 29–40.

CHRISTIAN WOZNICKI

Image Problem City. On the archival photographic projects of Sean Snyder

Coarse-grained pictures of a crowded crossroad in Tokyo, taken with a digital camera; an impressive series of photographs of medical facilities in Styria and Orlandia; isolated construction cranes in atmospheric pictures of urban waste land somewhere in Ibiza (…) Browsing through current magazines, the observation whereby, alongside pop, urban development was the key issue of the nineties is disconcertingly confirmed for the beginning of the new century, too. The disconcerting thing about these signs is that, in this context, urbanism does not connote temporary urban projects “concerned with socio-political issues rather than the buildings in the surrounding area.”¹ Quite the contrary: like the shiny layouts of Wired that bring the throbbing neon light of night-time street life to the hardware-heavy desks of our homes, so it would seem that more than ever before surrogates in the form of images are coming to feed our interest in architecture and urban ways of life.
The time when architects were the only people to make computer simulations, collages and photos is long past. Photo journalists are equally involved in the production process as are designers and artists. Exhibition venues and print media are becoming a new kind of semi-public archives. Thus, beyond the realm of classical architecture institutions, we are witnessing the spreading of a visual knowledge whose nature and essence have yet to be explored. One thing is certain, the spectrum ranges from extraordinary individual achievements such as Steve McQueen’s “Barrage” (Verlag Walther König, 2000) to the fetishization of exotic sites. There is emerging a rift between pictures which, in the sense of Julius Shulman, sell architecture and images that critically reflect on the relation of urban spaces and their representations.
It is within this problem area that we can site Sean Snyder’s archivist photography projects. The American artist scrutinises the city as an object of research in search of inconsistencies and obscurities. What is disregarded or unmentioned in the frenzy of pictorialized spatial needs is the focal point of his research.

¹ Miwon Kwon, “Im Interesse der Öffentlichkeit …”, in: Widerstände, springerin (Hrsg.) Folio Verlag, Vienna 1999, p. 100.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 70/2000, pp. 41–52.

ROLF SACHSSE

Marginalien zur österreichischen Fotografie

Text feature in Camera Austria International 70/2000, pp. 53–54.