Calling into question the terms of whatever medium one is engaged with is a standard practice in the rhetoric of art and, of course, has been for some time. The effect of this questioning is especially profound in the case of photography, given the very specific roles we expect it to fill. Paradoxically though, the photograph can meet these demands for a familiar legibility and at the same time completely undermine them, just by following its own values to some logical endpoint. Photography becomes a way to frame as set of propositions about how we order the world.
The recent work of Marten Lange – his series Anomalies in particular – is a beguiling example of this tendency. Although the pictures are “forensic” in style, the fact that he applies them to objects and surfaces of inscrutable significance brings some kind of irrationality to our own encounter with them, one that transcends his apparently straight-forward use of the camera, that mute capacity to “record” whatever stands in front of it. In Lange’s work this innate connection of photography to the visible reveals also an estrangement from it, a double life where the apprehension of some ordinary view ruptures its containment in the photograph, just because of how it is seen.
Any question about photography, then, is also a question about looking, and how we experience what is visible as an extension of consciousness. The very act of seeing creates its own subject, right is that unstable zone of encounter between the material world – the world of the image itself – and the “sense” we can make of it. But Lange’s work is not about disturbing perception in some obvious or facile way, there is no trick to how he presents these issues; rather there is a sustained process of investigation, one that goes to the heart of photography as a medium, its complex engagement with the world around us. The elusive quality of these images is that of vision itself.
See the rest of this series here.
