These fragments are just part of the whole, coordinates for a lost reality frozen at the very moment of its apprehension. Multiple impressions strung together in an uncertain, but somehow still rigorous fashion, hoping to discern from this complexity a pattern than is, in the end, more than the sum of its parts. But there inevitably remains a disturbing (and necessary) strangeness in the relationship between them – nothing quite fits as it should.
Let’s call it another kind of history then, one composed mostly of silence and awkward glances, the product of a very particular kind of attention to the world. In this sense the photographic work of Maximilian Rossner belongs to that other great European tradition of subjectivity, opposed – if not quite absolutely – to the pristine emotional clarity of a topographical view. These are still landscapes of course, but of a more intimate kind. Their fragmentation is not purposeful either, it is not imposed, rather it is found, and within that is the fundamental question of how we order what we find – is the shape of that order meaning in itself?
Yet the most desperate cliché of how we talk about visual art now is to say that it somehow “refuses” conclusion, to the extent that this has become a reflexive way of describing work that labours under the poetic heritage of modernism and its obsession with fracture. In Rossner’s photography, though, there is a response to the world that doesn’t preclude the chance of some incidental coherence, even if it is only possible though a photographic interaction – or perhaps especially then. Every frame is a testing of itself, its own condition.
It is work that depends not so much on a given subject, but rather the visual response to an experience suggested or provoked by a charged surface, some existential resonance. The photograph seems an unlikely vehicle for these insights, of course – they are at best insubstantial, resisting that sort of concrete expression. But the medium is also defined by an openness to the spaces between and around what is visible, at least in those cases when it is used against what we expect of it – not appearances, then, but relative positions, an encounter with the world as seen by the photographer.
Rossner has a website; have a look at this series and also this one.
