89 | 2005

THOMAS WESKI

Robert Adams: Finding Peace is a long Journey

“I’ve been going to school in California and I came back to Colorado and it wasn’t the same. I sensed I wanted to learn a way to speak about the landscape that I loved as a young person and that I was increasingly concerned about.” When Robert Adams began teaching at Colorado College in Colorado Springs in 1963 – having done his PhD in literature – he discovered a copy of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work in the library that induced him to take up photography. A local photographer taught the autodidact the necessary dark-room work. In the absence of a photography scene in Colorado, he began working in isolation, just for himself. “I was free to do whatever I wanted to do”. Adams had always felt an intimate rapport with the landscape since his earliest childhood, and spent much time in it. Upon returning from his studies and taking up professional life as a lecturer, he commenced his exploration of the American landscape. The American self-conception still thrives on the myth of a landscape of seemingly unlimited resources. Very much in line with the philosophy of the first settlers to move to intact areas once the land had been used up, today geographic mobility is still held to be an essential asset. The consequences for the landscape, but equally so for the people and the common wealth, are condoned.
In this brief text I would like to focus on two works that have been decisive with regard to Adams’ life-work: The New West, created at the end of the sixties, and the publication to appear this summer Turning Back. These two series are separated by almost forty years of exploring the American West. They describe the geographical and thematic poles of this important photographer’s path through life, whose biography is closely tied to the “Go West!” motto of the early settlers. He photographed their traces not only in his photographic series, revealing the changes in the understanding of landscape, but also moved to Oregon himself in the mid-nineties after many years in Colorado, thus – like the pioneers before him – reaching the natural boundary of the continent.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 89/2005, pp. 9–21.

MANISHA JOTHADY

Peter Piller: A Tennis Ball Discovered While Cutting the Hedge is Like a Bird of Prey´s Pellet

Peter Piller roamed around the Ruhr district in thirty-one stages from July 20 to September 26, 1996. He covered a total of 337 kilometres, the last five by ship. In addition to thirty-one ink drawings, each assigned to a particular stage of the journey, and notes recorded on tape on location, this “periphery journey” also produced a number of photographs. The latter mark the start of a preoccupation that is fundamentally characteristic of Piller’s artistic methodology today. These are photos of nothing substantial in the real sense, and they do not focus on any significant detail: should we pay our attention to the manhole cover outside the courtyard or to the concrete wall surrounding it? Is the yellow garden hose or the children’s swing beyond the intended subject? It is impossible to say what they are all about, let alone for what purpose these photos were taken – indeed, they seem to be so unintentionally that we cannot even infer a particular individual as their author.
Not only local German newspapers display a profusion of photos of such visual triviality: pictures, taken for one day, to illustrate articles of no great national interest – and yet pictures, all the same, that Peter Piller has, as he once stated, “always wanted to take”. He finds them in backwoods newspapers with such names as Delmenhorster Kreisblatt, Trostberger Tageblatt, Zollern-Alb Kurier, Backnanger Kreiszeitung, etc. The Hamburg-based artist has access to some eighty different local papers thanks to his job at the Carat media agency, where his task is to locate any wrongly placed advertisement – a monotonous job, to be sure, but one which quite obviously keens the eye for details that we generally disregard. In 1998, Piller began cutting out the newspaper photos not required for the company’s archives, collecting them, categorising them in subject groups according to certain criteria, systematising and archiving them. The “Peter Piller Archive” currently comprises between 6000 and 7000 pictures. The majority have been taken from daily newspapers and are arranged in some 100 collecting areas. Another section contains pictures from the Internet. Several of his own photos along with a number of postcards of unexploded shells from World War I are also included. The web site at www.peterpiller.de provides access to all of this.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 89/2005, pp. 22–30.

WOLFGANG KOS

Occasionally Photos. The Ephemeral Total Art Work of Ingeborg Strobl

Ingeborg Strobl’s work, to put it similarly is subject to the law of dispersion. We cannot discern any dividing walls and sharp edges towards the inside or out. Carefully, almost nothing joins together with any stability. The exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, then, had a precise title, “Einige Gegenstände. Und Sonnenuntergang.” (Several objects. And sunset). For all the consistency of certain topics – the animal, the biological cycle, consumer mentality, coincidence, the ephemeral, the distrust of controlled expectations – formally, everything may be relativised, annulled and reiterated in some other permutation at any time. Because the artist performed this finely structured game above all with pencil and watercolour brush to begin with, writings about Ingeborg Strobl often deployed such terms as “delicate” or “lyrical”. While there is something to this, it does disguise the severity and graphicness equally found in Strobl’s work. The impression of poise created by many works may have to do with a strategy of subdesign. Much remains merely hinted at and laconic – set with precision, but open-ended. Reduction, but without pompousness.
The general principle throughout is that of the collage, even in the original sense of a “glued picture”. Often in several layers of materials, one on top of the other, this provides room for irony. Let us describe a sheet of paper, small in format, like most of these works, as one example: the bottom layer is a relief-like gift wrapping paper covered in roses and wedding rings. Stuck on this is a postcard-sized piece of drawing paper with a few watercolour brushstrokes and the suggestion of a pencilled grid. Stuck on top of this, in turn, is a tiny newspaper photo of the actor Depardieu, gazing soulfully ahead, and a short typed comment – “Gérard Depardieu looking at art”. We see that photography was always involved, even if it usually came in through the back door.
Her handling of photography displays different strategies. On the one hand, to touch on the ornament theme once again (which, as we know, is by no means purely “ornamental” in cultures in which it is important), we observe repetitive methods – rhythmic threading, pattern repetitions in the style of leopard skins, snake skins or textile rapports. This can take on large dimensions. In one installation at Vienna’s “Remise”, a former tram depot, a hundredfold reproduced photo of a rabbit lying in its own blood became a gigantic floor ornament.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 89/2005, pp. 31–42.

DANIEL BAUMANN

God. Interview with Piotr Uklanski

Daniel Baumann: You often draw upon a very romantic visual vocabulary, especially in your photography. Why?

Piotr Uklanski: I like to work with something that seems totally empty. I was interested in images killed by the interpretations. Images so banal that they seem to be too empty to make any kind of statement. Also, I liked the idea that a viewer has to do most of the work and compensate for the saturated banality of the imagery. Finally, I like images of fire, sunsets, landscapes, or waterfalls. They look nice. Why not?

D. B.: Could you say more about the origins of your series “The Joy of Photography”?

P. U.: I started making these photos in 1996.

D. B.: It appropriates the title of a self-help book published by Kodak, a guide for amateur photographers. The concept of amateur photography has vanished. Nowadays, it is either professional or the hi-tech camera does it for you. The uncle that buys a special filter to photograph the sunset has disappeared.

P. U.: Yeah. The only aesthetic position close to that persists on the pages of National Geographic.

D. B.: It is a huge visual potential yet executed with great simplicity since you don’t need any fancy technical equipment. One could say that these pictures mix romantic iconography and minimalism – in their rigorous execution. I understand these two forces not as an uneasy tension, but as complementing elements enhancing each other. In a recent review published in Artforum, Felicity Lunn described your recent show at the Kunsthalle Basel as being “Baroque minimalism” which is accurate…

P. U.: …or, better, “Balkan minimalism”.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 89/2005, pp. 43–54.

TOM HOLERT

Mass-Media Acts (2)

On Visual Programming of the Political Space: Carrying Pictures

Pictures are published and disseminated in very different ways. We print them or send them, exhibit them or broadcast them. And, sometimes, we even carry them around with us: on our skin, as a T-shirt print, as a sticker, as a photo in our wallet, as a magazine under our arm, as a logo on our mobile phone display. Although the forms of technicised and largely dematerialised image transport dominate everywhere, seemingly archaic traditions of introducing visual objects into the media’s current image spaces are still upheld or invented.
For instance, when photographs or other material images are literally carried into these spaces for the purpose of a collective declaration of intent – in religious processions, propagandist rallies, political demonstrations. These are generally pictures of individuals, portraits that can be held, raised or pressed to one’s chest. People act as living exhibition architecture, mobile display units, moving parerga.
The fact that the street is still a useful political arena is due, not least, to a persistent interest of the image media in mass outdoor events. There are several reasons for this interest, ranging from visually favourable daylight to various associations of the public sphere with the openness of every open-air event. But in order to deposit more in a picture itself than the information that a crowd has gathered in a street or a square ? and not merely by attaching a caption – it is necessary for the actors to produce a semiotic surplus, that is to say, to show more than themselves.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 89/2005, p. 72–73.