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Texte zur zeitgenössischen Fotografie und digitalen Bildkunst
Jörg Koopmann: "cat seen, book with a beard" 2009,
ISBN 978 3 00 0267321
A newly founded publishing house from Munich (with a name no less funny than „These Birds Walk“) has put into print and covers one of the series I liked best last year, „the naked forest“ and set it against a second series called „pet houses“. The latter was taken in the aftermath of the Kathrina hurricane in New Orleans, and it makes a lot more sense than say the posh and utterly meaningless series one Robert Polidori brought back. Koopmann achieves this by photographing empty houses that carry graffiti tags by animal rights groups that documented the animals living in the abandonded houses, their condition and the food they had and should be given. „The naked forest“ is a longtime project of portraying animals (ants, an eagle, a horse rolling on his back, cats, dolphins just to name a few) all around the world, in each case right in the centre of the frame, with a sometimes calm, sometimes humourous, sometimes cruel formal quality that brings Eggleston to mind. Both series together in this nicely produced book work together by cleverly questioning the space inhabi-
ted by or alloted to animals, their life and death, the way we see and feel them in a distanced yet caring way.
Gerhard Richter: "Wald", Walther König 2008, 395 pages,
ISBN 978 3 86560 503 0
We were talking about woods in photography recently, Jitka Hanzlova, Robert Adams, Yoshiko Ueda and Lee Friedlander (with a quick praise for „New Mexico“ published by Radius late last year), when someone mentioned this new book by Gerhard Richter. It has the size of a larger novel and some German text (scrambled so as to be unreadable) and a lot of images from one small wood. One doesn’t directly see the abstract painter at work, primarily these are unartistical images of trees and branches in different seasons, and a lot of those. Upon closer inspection the formal qualities (which are not so much based on photographical techniques) become visible, and it is overwhelming to see how Richter achieves this just by his cropping and the precise use of the light at hand. The images are so much more unromantic than most of this subject and yet they have a clarity that is rare and stupefying.
09.04.2009
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google english translation
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