On German Photography Today

“Photography has caught on in art and given up its separate existence.” This assertion by critic Klaus Honnef during a panel discussion sums up why it’s become so hard these days to talk about photography in art or, for that matter, art in photography.

The former is all too self-evident, the latter – art in photography – has volatilized not only in physical terms, but above all in visual practice. The emergence of new media as well as video and computer-generated images has sparked a renaissance of realism on a wide front and in every genre of the visual arts; forms of abstraction have been stricken from the value hierarchy in the fine arts, are no longer of importance in the making or understanding of art. Meanwhile, the cutting and pasting of pictures upon pictures – reproduced all but ad infinitum, as Walter Benjamin foresaw back in 1936 – is, as it were, setting aside the semantic canon of iconography that has been passed down to us. In negative terms, all artists need now is a good memory for pictures: the repetition of images déjà-vues is superseding knowledge of their meaning.

The “anything goes“ of postmodern philosophy also goes for photography nowadays. The artist Gerhard Richter, for instance, paints over old or reproduced photographs with thick layers of oil colours; others paint using found or staged photos – nowadays increasingly culled from the press. But generally speaking the photographer’s swelling sense of himself as an artist has given rise to a renaissance of traditional subjects – albeit refracted through the prism of media images. A few examples will elucidate.

Traditional genres of photography: Landscapes

The lowest category in the classical hierarchy of painting, landscapes since the 17th century have been the genre best suited to exploring the means and process of painting itself. It was much the same at the invention of photography, when new ways of representing landscapes were tested, including panorama, photomontage and tone-value reduction. A similar canon of exploration using simple subjects has established itself in photography over the past two decades, though from various directions. Like some of his Austrian peers, Axel Hütte uses traditional means to explore the many possibilities of landscapes and their romantic self-portrayal to the point of disintegration into meaninglessness – i.e. to the point of extirpating the very last reference to previous images – and still makes simply beautiful pictures again and again.

Beate Guetschow goes a radically different way – with great success, as affirmed in exhibitions in the US and Europe. Her pictures are composed of numerous, sometimes innumerable, little images she pulls off the Web. The overall effect of each composition, however, is one of astounding unity. And in their light and landscapes her works call to mind the 17th-century Dutch painting to which art owes the experience of a self-referentiality of form and work, the very basis of immersion in image and landscape alike. Other works by the artist show modern architecture that has never existed in that form.

Portraiture

The return of the classic portrait has been proclaimed many times over, but is usually concealed in reporter assignments like celebrity shoots. An equally unusual and contemporary approach is found in the work of Walter Schels, who worked as a portraitist his whole life long. His latest group of works shows people of various ages shortly before and right after death in poignant diptychs, with accompanying texts by Beate Lakotta.

Nudes

Through photography, the portrayal of the bare human form has gone from a highly regarded depictive art – always imbued of course with an erotic flair – to pornography, and that is reflected in the photographic work of many an artist. Certainly one of the most well-known examples of this confrontation with a sometimes concealed but nonetheless omnipresent media world is a series by Thomas Ruff. He reproduces images off the Web, blurs them by means of a painting technique that previously served Gerhard Richter for a transition between painting and photography, and serves them up in outsized prints, which in turn reflect on the genre of nudes.

Plants

The age-old genre of still life is the only one in which the new technological media have wrought a sea change, though its semantic import is reflected, at least from afar, in new fields of artistic endeavour: the representation of biological objects, whether flora or fauna. An extensive series of works by Thomas Struth may help prove the point: his photographs of plants – and you never know whether they were shot in nature, in botanical gardens or museums, or artificial dioramas – pose questions at once about ecology and about the credibility of media representations, but are occasionally just beautiful pictures.

Literature Lakotta, Beate, and Walter Schels. Noch mal leben vor dem Tod: Wenn Menschen sterben. Munich: dva, 2008. 224 pages, €39.90