Snap Shots english text

Each attempt at approaching photography as a phenomenon seems to get stuck in the contradiction that has been its constant companion ever since the camera has become common goods, namely that between the photo as an art form, and taking photos as a mass occupation.

If we wish to maintain photography as an autonomous art form, we must argue within the framework of that contradiction, by drawing sharp boundaries to taking photos as mindless popular enjoyment.

Inversely, each honest attempt at regarding leisure photography as an act with its very own content, without reducing it to mere symbolic or sociological acts, must take its departure point in a stubborn denial of a photography of higher value.

This limitation of premises is narrowed even further by the fact that photography as genre, coupled with its popularity and enormous impact, and despite its relatively short history, has been forced to make a considerable revision of its own expectations. Even more so in the case of the naive belief that, in the photograph, man has found a flawless technique of depicting reality such as it actually is. As early as the beginning of the last century, photography met with the suspicion that the photo may even be the least objective and truthful form of depiction. Each image is in constant movement towards the boundaries of incomprehensibility, and is brought back into the realms of understanding only by pointing to a context of interpretation, that has already been established before the act of depicting is commenced. Since thereby, the photo is not a thing of representation, its conception must be labelled as some kind of original act of creation, rather than passive, objective depiction.

Hereby, this insight also hits the most sincere metaphysical realism that, in the photo, had hoped to find that cleansing bath for giving or, rather, refurnish the object with its true, its very own face. This is a hope given an ironic repartee already in the technique of making the actual photo: the exposed film is immersed in a fluid, until the instant where an image suddenly appears - as out of nowhere.

The long row of crushed hopes and revised beliefs that have followed in the path of the photo during the entire 20th Century, has shattered the innocence of the photograph. It is no longer possible to raise your camera, focus and press your finger, without ending up in this or that ready made position, this or that genre; depleted, analysed to death and, not least, worn down by thousands of forerunners. Not only has each photograph already been taken, not only can each shutter movement thereby do nothing but repeat an already completed motif - but each motif is already part of a completed genre, whose significance, through innumerable analyses and commentaries, have become hackneyed and dissolved.

This is a situation where the critical eye has become blind to the photo - to photography as a phenomenon, but also to the actual, real, photo. Critical analysis and elucidation, revision and repositioning, seem to have made it impossible to say anything at all about the photo. To look at a photo is to see a given template and with this empty glance acknowledge the blindness that, seemingly, makes the photo impossible. Apart from its specific failure to depict the object as object, the photo has, for a long time, also been forced to acknowledge the intrinsic, general distortion mechanisms which force each object, no matter how gruesome we expect it to be, appear a thing of imperative beauty. Furthermore, and all in line with this very same mechanism, the motif attracts a certain sentimentality.

The beauty and the sentimentality - additions of sadness and longing, not motivated by the object itself - originate in what one might call the incomplete completeness of the photo: its capacity for depicting a complete world from just a frozen fragment of reality.

The motif of the photo is perfectly real, but cut out of time and context. It is thus forced to borrow from the world of the observer to make up its own reality, to borrow from his or her wish to be seduced, enticed. The beauty of the photograph emanates from the intense, elevated presence born in the meeting between its own lack of context and our sentimental will to complete, not first and foremost the motif, but our own lives. The photograph lets us play the life we cannot articulate but still long for, when daydreaming of the kind of complete and total presence we fail to achieve in our everyday lives.

By the very sense of being disconnected, the world of the photo becomes a thing of beauty. It offers to us the possibility of constructing a complete world, using the most hidden and at the same time the best loved material we possess - our own inarticulate longing and our long treasured daydreams. The photo calls out for subjects and, willingly, we rush to populate it - as though each photograph were a lovely world, but one with a silhouette of a hole, to be filled by just us to make up a perfect fit.

The distinctive character of the photograph is therefore its quality of touching man. It only talks of one thing, repeats, chant, calls out: Man. More than any other art form, more than any of the things that surround us, the photo has the capability of revealing the innermost qualities of man, of a singular living individual, in the aspects rarely seen in everyday life. The thin, hard paper image manages not only to address the observer, not only to reflect to the observer an image of himself. It also manages to depict the incomplete, the fragmentary that dwells in the life of the observer - in life itself.

Rather than being the most realistic or truthful technique of depiction, the photo is instead the most mystical. It manages to display and hold on to something in human nature itself, something ever present but which, in everyday reality, glides past the frame of vision. This capacity or quality is not just where man makes up the subject of the photograph - every single photograph reaches out a human hand to its subject, singles it out from an undifferentiated crowd and clutches it to man's bosom as part of real life, incorporated into the most secret identity of one single human being.

Now that Neon Gallery sends out 16 disposable cameras around the world, to ask the same number of artists to take 27 photos each, it is not just the photos that come back to us, here in Brösarp, Österlen, South Eastern Skåne. One could say that Neon has sent one single camera on a worldwide trip. One single camera with the purpose of taking 16 photos. One of each person. So, together with the films, 16 living persons have arrived, who each and every one has travelled from his or her particular spot in the world – from what we chose to call afar - Ahmedabad, New York, Prague, Mexico City. They have come here to tell us something - to say Yes You Exist, Yes I Exist Here With You.

Mimiyo Tomazawa brings her children for a visit and thus hands us the greatest and most defenceless of all confidence. The trust in this her gesture springs out of love for a child, a love in which we now share and which lets us experience the overturn of strength a child can cause - it is the children who provide us with comfort and security, not, as we would have it, the other way around.

Philippe Hernandez/Sanna Ingman, Olaf Holzapfel, Christian Lemmerz, Theo Böttger - they, in a way, also stand comforting before us, but the departing point of their open gestures is of a less charged context. They all let us come for a stroll along an ordinary day. A day like our own, of course, filled with people, crowds, movement, views. Filled with the committing assurance of the ordinary, the syllogism whose conclusion acknowledges the real as real. Hernandez/Ingman and Holzapfel give us everyday life from two continents, far away not only in distance. And the further the better. Since we recognize it all any way - the shops the bars, the salesmen - the sense of closeness increases with the distance. While Hernandez/Ingman, like in the portraits of old, place themselves in the centre of a gallery of characters, transmitting something infinitely more important to the photograph than features, there is a humorist tempo in Holzapfel's movement along his day, a tempo which gives these people and events a lightness to break all tension. Lemmerz's day also contains lightness, but of the kind that holds a note of bitterness. What is calm and bright is not just calm and bright. It attaches, invisibly, to something beyond, to what once was or to that which inevitably is soon to be. In the same way we find Böttger's hours more drastically curtailed without flowing gestures or swinging arms. It is a stylised statement, making its way in a sort of deliberately limping movement, whose jerky gait is not halted by potholes or pitfalls.

Saule Bapanova reminds us of the self-evident security of manual labour. She also manages, with almost surrealist precision, to point out the unshakable hold of the human hand on reality - thus, thus and here.

Martin Klapper, Christian Yde Frostholm and Martin Kann have also strolled through the city. Out of this landscape they let man shine or perhaps even hold a shine to us. Through a purposeful purposelessness Klapper tries to reach something beside the obvious, in some sort of dead angles of landscape, where the riddle could be made to suggest an answer. Frostholm has looked the other way, towards the Stranger, she who has dropped out of every context and whose dealings no longer interest the community. She is not forgotten or lost. She has stepped into an altogether individual world, with no links to the world around her. Thereby she becomes the sister of the photo itself. Her identity must take its departing point in herself, alone.

Kann's presence at Neon does in actual fact make up the 26th image in his presentation. That which in Vancouver only exists outside the city's galleries, exists here, in Brösarp, inside the actual building.

If we best understand the distinctive character of the photo by classifying it as fetish, then Helena Franzén, David Tibet, Yvet Anna, Rosan Bosch and Jim O'Rourke double this function by harnessing the fetishes in their private lives. The doors, the cats, shimmering gold, the functional contents of the home… - the way in which we understand the photo, these objects are the mother of that photo. Mixed with the caresses of the eyes, the fingers, they are all photos long before they were even photographed. O'Rourke gives this definition yet an extra twist by allowing the doubling of the fetish to be housed in the photo itself. Oliver Hangl also cunningly comments the ever-repeated murder mystery of the photo - the missing person is always one and the same, we. Leah Singer also shows us her everyday, muted, in the shade of a measureless emptiness, though not with the laconic cynicism that would lie in the inference that life goes on. In the eyes of Lee and Leah, there is another look. Not that which, self-centred, says Nothing will be what it once was, but that which promises us It is possible to live.

So there is a great, perhaps incomprehensible - generosity in the choice of these people to be present here with us. A generosity we otherwise feel only around those near and dear to us, the friends most present. The will to be present becomes a possibility by the ability of the photo to, at the same time, invite us into the image and make us come alive in it.

The photograph, like an unsolved paradox, leads us in a roundabout circular movement, from the acknowledgement of its faking, via our own sentimentality and longing, over to the realization that the photograph is, in actual fact, more real than perhaps all other reality: it is reality itself at its most present.

If we, for a moment, dare trust the true nature – down to the deepest truthfulness - of the photo's sentimentality, then that is why, in this generous, living presence of the world here, with us, right now, we can feel a great sense of comfort, a comfort that knows no boundaries.

C-G Thosteman

English translation by Karin Harboe