Maximilian Rossner

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.

Ron Jude - Alpine Star

The context in which we find a photograph goes a long way toward determining the way it is read. Even if the pictures are not essentially changed, the shift in context redefines their meaning. Photographs are without some obvious measure of their intent, as such, and so we are guided in our understanding of them by the experience of how they are brought to us. Altering the context of an image renders the photograph as an unstable point of contact between use and effect. In that sense, the meaning of a photograph is always semantically open.

Based on a sequence of pictures culled from the back-issues of a small town newspaper, Alpine Star by Ron Jude engages with the fictions of our collective memory. We find at work something far stranger than the standard assault on a photographic “code” that has undermined most discussion of the subject. This is not just another deconstruction of photography as if it were a kind of conceptual problem to be solved and explicated, but rather an irrational poetics of the archive. Jude has fashioned an uncanny anti-narrative, its precise structure defined by a tension native to photography itself. The result is more than just the sum of its parts – he achieves, in this minimal way, a very satisfying and provocative ambiguity.

See more here and read this interview for some more background on the series.

Mishka Henner - No Man's Land

There are places that we just don’t go, and this reluctance has little to do with geography – or at least, not the actual contingencies of landscape. Rather, these distances are specifically cultural; places (and people) are reduced to a state of invisibility rooted in the privilege of being seen, the often unearned right to assume one’s own visibility as a social force, and conversely, of negating the visibility of others. Mishka Henner’s fascinating work No Man’s Land deals, at least in part, with these themes. The project centres on the use of images taken from Google Street View presumably showing improvised sites of “commercial” sex along the back-roads and motorways of several European countries. These woman (and in so far as I can tell, they’re mostly women) are confined to various non-places, disposable realities captured with near manic blankness. Street View is a monument to our times, a volatile presence, everywhere and nowhere.

This invisibility is a lack of economic as well as cultural agency. People have long been commodities, but it has never been easier for us not to see that fact. The social balance is always tipped in favour of those who control the ability to define it. So when we talk about “privilege” we really mean the assumption that society is an extension of how we see the world. The order of privilege, its stability, depends on that imbalance to somehow validate it. An increasing sense of distance allowed by technology, the ease with which we can hold the world at arm’s length, is just another function of these inherently flawed and alienating structures. The women in Henner’s work remain ciphers; even at the very moment in which they come under scrutiny their identity is lost. This is, of course, a tenant of the Street View project, but it is also a rather piercing metaphorical description of the faceless lives they lead.

Of all the recent projects in this idiom, No Man’s Land seems to me one of the most effective, in so far as it links the new technology with a relevant social context (Doug Rickard’s work is also exemplary for that reason). If the aim of Street View is, in a pseudo-imperial way, to make the world “visible” then surely it also succeeds – as we can see in Henner’s work – at revealing the limits of that visibility, because it occurs under a paradigm of tacit and ultimately, false authority. It is as if we cannot see these things, except at a costly distance from them, a distance that suggests they are not part of “our” world at all. Yet this is the world that has created and now sustains the very lives these women live. The way in which they are seen embodies a social paradox; by incorporating this sense of (social and technological) distance into his work Henner achieves something unique.

You can find more here.