Ludwig Seyfarth
Stored Time - Nathalie Grenzhaeuser's photo series Omaha Beach
At the end of the nineteenth century increasing attempts were made to transfer the stylistic standards of painting to the then fledgling medium of photography. The contoured depth of detail, initially one of the most vaunted characteristics of photographic images, was assailed by growing numbers of critics who saw this as a soulless, levelling egalitarianism. An excess of definition was felt to hamper the overall unity of composition, without which photography would never achieve the status of an art form. As popular as the deliberate blurriness of turn-of-the-century Pictorialism was, all the more vehement was its dismissal somewhat later by the radical proponents of Modernism. In his book on the Bauhaus, "Painting, Photography and Film" (1927), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy didactically demonstrated how photography had to free itself from Romantic landscapes and soft-focus vistas and, as he saw it, seek its own identity. He used an agency photograph of an aircraft formation in flight over the Arctic Ocean to illustrate "repetition as a spatial and temporal structural motif that with such abundance and precision was only made possible through the industrialized mode of technical reproduction so typical of our era".
At first sight, Nathalie Grenzhaeuser's series Omaha Beach is reminiscent more of the pictures Moholy-Nagy marshalled as negative examples to highlight what he viewed as "correct" photography: the moody romantic view of a Zeppelin over the sea and a street scene that Alfred Stieglitz shot from a slight elevation and in a soft-focus Impressionist manner.
Grenzhaeuser shows clay-toned landscapes on the Normandy coast in the north of France shrouded in the sombre light of approaching storms, with solitary trees braving the wind à la Caspar David Friedrich. The pictures are based on photographs Grenzhaeuser took during several visits to the region.
The way the actual scenes appear to slide into a mysteriously entranced realm of the imagination is the result of more or less comprehensive modification of the images on the computer. In some cases this allows her to create similar effects to those achieved over a hundred years ago by means of gelatine coating, coarse-grained film and paper, or gum bichromate printing processes.
The aims and stylistic approach identified by Wolfgang Ullrich in the work of Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944), the pioneer of the gum process and the key advocate of Pictorialism in the German speaking world, seem to have made a comeback in the hands of Nathalie Grenzhaeuser, if one considers her assertion of "total control over the picture's surface" or a "partial abandonment of illusional space, which mutates instead into atmospheric space."
Marginalized too is the documentary and factual emphasis that to some extent prevails in the photographs shot at the same sites by Paul Virilio to illustrate his historical military research into "Bunker archéologie" (1975). Bunkers and other military edifices are scattered along the desolate beaches that became the setting for the landing of the Allied armies on 6 June 1944. Historical facts are not made explicit in Grenzhaeuser's photographs but are subsumed in a body of multilayered visual memory. Topoi of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape painting and the Pictorialist photography supplanted by Modernism provide a foil whose continued development up to the present day is leafed through like a film shown in reverse. Cinematic associations are manifold and in some measure historical. Several photographs call to mind the theatrical studio filmsets of the 1930s and 40s: the museum that reminds us of a landed UFO looks as though it has come straight out of a sci-fi movie. Subtle retouching has heightened the irreality of real scenes, although digital enhancement is never overtly visible. But does it even make much sense to call such images photography? Or are we here instead dealing with a new type of image that has been digitally processed from a hybrid amalgam of conventional forms of imagery? This question concerning innovation raises itself only in technical terms: even the Pictorialist gum-method prints with their "mimicry of art" were ultimately also strange hybrids, a mixture of techniques drawn from photography, painting and printing.
2 Ullrich, Unschärfe..., S. 391.
3 ebd., S. 392.
Edward Steichen (1876-1973), initially one of the leading advocates of Pictorialism in America, endeavoured to make his famous self-portrait from 1901/02 resemble a lithograph. During the First World War Steichen was put in charge of American air reconnaissance photography over France, a task that completely changed his artistic ideas. The discovery of bird's-eye perspective brought by practical experience – Moholy-Nagy had to programmatically ascend the Berlin radio tower a few years later to achieve the same – caused Steichen to repudiate Pictorialism in order to find a new definition of the image, one directly inspired by photography as a medium and by its methodical practice, as he recollected in his autobiography.
Similar to Moholy-Nagy with the aircraft formation and the radio tower, Steichen's biography would also suggest that Pictorialism was made historically redundant by the 1920s avant-garde. The still widely popular view that blurring "is nothing more that the rhetorical tool of a kitsch-inclined imagination" is vehemently contradicted by Wolfgang Ullrich: "The fact that the main current of the avant-garde ultimately succeeded in asserting abstraction against the blurred image (at least for a few decades) could on the one hand prove to have been mere chance and is not necessarily an expression of superiority."
In the present-day context of the German-speaking world Nathalie Grenzhaeuser's atmospheric images signal a renaissance of the blurred image, which is increasingly emerging as an alternative to the documentary formalism of the Bechers and of several of their followers. The glut of detail in many of Andreas Gursky's pictures would certainly have been a severe eyesore to the Pictorialists. But even within the entourage of the Becher school we can observe a seamless transition from the drawn line to a moody soft focus, as in the infra-red night shots by Thomas Ruff or Elger Esser's landscapes, which are flooded with atmospheric light reminiscent of Claude Lorrain. Esser's photographs (which also include panoramas from the Atlantic coast) benefit from the unanticipated jarring of perception prompted by the updating of compositional conventions in contemporary landscape painting.
4 Ebd., S. 401.
5 Ebd., S. 412.
In Nathalie Grenzhaeuser's work the pictorial memory of landscape seems instead more like a historical continuum that has been compressed into the surface of the photograph and waits for the patient viewer to expand and extract the sum of time stored in the image through an equivalent measure of time spent contemplating it.
Translated by Matthew Partridge
Vgl. Wolfgang Ullrich, Unschärfe, Antimodernismus und Avantgarde, in: Peter Geimer (Hg.), Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit. Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie, Frankfurt/M: 2002, S. 381-412 und ders.: Die Geschichte der Unschärfe, Berlin 2003.