Barbara Seiler

I made this in the studio with a spoon’ seems an absurd statement from a photographer. Yet this exhibition brings together three artists who renew the medium of photography through their investigations of making with it. Sarah Conaway works in the studio photographing objects with keen focus and care, though those objects would generally be overlooked. They can be scraps of material that assume great importance, or bits of mean stuff that take on significant value in their documentation; they can also transcend their object nature and suggest symbolic meanings. Katja Mater’s work is also studio-based and a challenge to define. She shares an interest in the documentary potential of photography, but her scrutiny of this involves multiple exposures of single negatives. Her subjects are often constructions from cardboard that she alters during the photography process, so that the transformation and the passage of time are encapsulated in one image. Georg Gatsas, in comparison, is best known for his portraiture of underground communities, images from within groups and milieus outside the mainstream. He has undertaken documentary projects that recorded particular music scenes, for example, or in another instance the people that gather on Europe’s borders.
In this exhibition the artists show works that are consistent with their artistic methods, but that may at first seem atypical. Gatsas, for example, will present works from the ‘Grandmother’s Box’ series, a collection of photographs taken by the artist’s grandmother at a Fasnacht celebration in the Lucerne region. These black and white images are found, and thus appropriated, but in terms of their composition and engagement with their subjects they cohere with Gatsas’ contemporary practice. Conaway will present studio-made still-lifes as well as two further found images, one a reproduction of a fashion shot in which an elegant, fur-clad woman renders two onlooking men imbeciles, another an image of a diorama picturing prehistoric humans. These latter pieces defy comprehension; though their content is clear, viewed alongside Conaway’s other works, which train so much attention on one point, the found images no longer correspond to our understanding of photography’s documentary veracity. We see but don’t ‘get’ what is before our eyes. Mater’s ‘Time Passing Objects’ give rise to similar destabilisation, because as her maquette-like objects evolve, and are photographed in the process, a blurring results from minute shifts occurring during several stages of exposure. Even though Mater employs a still camera, the end effect echoes the doubled or tripled shapes arising from poor television reception or low quality video. These are foreign, unplaceable impressions; they are evidently real but yet frequently illegible. And they portray more than has existed in any one moment.
This strangeness and unfamiliarity testifies to all three artists’ fresh consideration of photographs of objects. Their works accept an indexical relationship between an object and its photographic documentation, yet they extend the medium’s influence on its subject. Photography is thus not a stable and neutral process but instead transformative. Equally, all three consider photographs as objects, albeit image-carrying objects, which can be treated like other objects in the artist’s repertoire. So the photographer is no longer just a documenter or observer, but a creator and maker.
Text: Aoïfe Rosenmeyer