ART; The Picnic That Never Was - The New York Times

08/10/12 18:01

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November 21, 2004

ART; The Picnic That Never Was

By PHILIP GEFTER

PHOTOGRAPHS may correspond to the way things actually look in the world, but optical precision is not the same thing as reality. In the art world, the truth-telling capabilities of photography are tethered less to fact than to ideas about perception, emotion and cultural evolution. If documentary work shows us that life may be stranger than fiction, recent conceptual photography counters that fabrication may be truer than life. Beate G?how, a 34-year-old artist in Berlin whose first New York show is on view at Danziger Projects in Chelsea, has made a series of landscape pictures in which grass, trees, sky and figures all look authentic enough. And individually, the elements are genuine; she photographed them as she found them in forests and public parks in Germany. But the landscapes in her pictures don't exist. Each is constructed from up to 30 separate photographs. After a month of taking pictures outdoors with a 35millimeter camera, Ms. G?how scanned the pictures into her electronic archive and began the painstaking process of constructing her landscapes at the computer. ''I don't work with an image in my head,'' she said by phone from Berlin. ''I work from my picture files. I start by sketching on my computer. First the people. Then the trees. I might put two trees together. Then the foreground. I build it very quickly.'' In the case of ''Untitled (L.S.) #13,'' (45 x 35 inches), the two trees do not exist together as they appear; she photographed each one separately on the same day in Rostock, near the German coast. The people were assembled from separate pictures, and the wall on which they are sitting was photographed at a railroad station. Four different images were used to create the sky. While Ms. G?how does not construct her landscapes with preconceived images in mind, the work cunningly plays on our ideas about painting and photography. Her Edenic scenes intentionally pay homage to 17th-century landscape painting, in particular the work of Claude Lorrain and Jacob van Ruisdael, referencing this tradition to highlight an idealized version of nature. By working with photographic imagery, which creates a sense of verisimilitude, she underscores the artificiality of this romantic ideal. ''Two-hundred-year-old landscape paintings are not interesting to me,'' she said. ''But to take something normally found in painting and transfer it to photography, that's what interests me. The landscape is just the door I use to enter the idea of perception.'' Different perceptual effects arise from recording the world with photographs as opposed to interpreting it in paint. Allegiance to one approach or the other has long created tensions between the two mediums. But while Ms. G?how has set out to interpret the world, her goal is not to emulate painting. There is no pretense that her landscapes are anything but photographic. They are C-prints mounted with the full white margin, crop marks in place for framing and all the technical information about the print lining the image vertically: its date, size, resolution, the kind of paper it's printed on and the name of the lab where it was printed. This full disclosure of technical detail amounts to a declaration that this work is about 21st-century experience, not 17th- or 18th-century romanticism. And yet. There is something elegiac about fabricating a utopian past in idyllic landscapes devoid of skyscrapers, billboards and traffic. But the technical data printed on the side of these quiet scenes is an emphatic reminder of the electronic world that has supplanted a more innocent one. Civilization has advanced; we possess more knowledge, and with it a world-weary cynicism. Ms. G?how's pictures force us to consider a more serene world, while also reminding us that no contemporary experience is unmediated: technology touches everything.

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ART; The Picnic That Never Was - The New York Times

08/10/12 18:01

It's hard to say whether the use of fabrication in current photography is a reflection of the zeitgeist, or merely idiosyncratic. Loretta Lux, another young German photographer, makes portraits of young children that are digitally inserted into her own delicately painted backgrounds to preternatural effect. Thomas Demand, yet another young German, makes photographs of uncannily true-to-life environments that he constructs out of paper and cardboard. The American Gregory Crewdson creates domestic scenes with actors and stage sets, using a production crew more typical of moviemaking than of studio photography. His pictures combine the look of advertising with that of Hollywood publicity stills. This high-concept work examines perceptual aspects of photography by posing riddles about how the images were made. Each is a kind of photographic trompe l'oeil. Those who consider photography factual terra firma might assume that digital technology has weakened the medium's hold on reality. No doubt it has made it easier to manipulate photographic images, making observable reality harder to identify in its hall of mirrors. But as Richard Avedon said, all photographs are accurate. None are the ''truth.'' In an essay for a group show in which Ms. G?how took part this year at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Ludwig Seyfarth wrote that ''the more photography is treated as art, the less space is left to the unintentional: one is meant to sense the artist's attention to every photographic detail.'' Of course, this has always been the case, whether photographers are making pictures on the street or in the studio. But more recently, conceptual work in all mediums has blurred the line between photographers who make art and artists who use photography. In Ms. G?how's case, she has carefully constructed narrative images from multiple sources, a process not apparent in the lyrical results. Her work comments as much on the trickery of photography as it does on the virtue of her subject. And by including the data on the final print, she acknowledges the digital technology that was integral to her work -- a perceptual layer that is crucial to our times. ''In my work,'' she says, ''ideal means not to exclude the ugliness; it means to construct reality.'' BEATE G?SCHOW Danziger Projects 521 West 26th Street; through Jan. 15. Photo: Beate Gtschow's ''Untitled (L.S.) #13'' is constructed from many different images.

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