Katharina Bosse:

The space beyond

Memory
When I was a child, I watched my parents talk. They loved words, and chose them
carefully. Listening in, their language felt more like a false bottom than a safety net
and left me with the need to be alert. I tried to grasp the meaning of their words—
which word had been used to cover up another? In my mind, I created a negative
space out of their speech, filled with unspoken words.

Space, No Speech
The space beyond is The Place of No Speech, the photographic unconscious1.
Unknown territory, uninhabitable, even for images. “Today is the last day that I am
using words,” said Madonna,2 or, from Wittgenstein’s philosophical point of view,
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.“3 He also stated: “What can
be said at all can be said clearly,“ excellent advice for any photographer.
Using a method comparable to inverted selection, one can say that three features of
photography define that vast expanse of space: image frame, exposure time, and
picture plane.

Frame
Stephen Shore: “One of the bigger problems of people starting photography,”
according to Shore, “is that they’re thinking of photography as pointing and not
framing, so they’re looking at an object and their field of perception kind of dissipates
as it gets to the edge, like the way a rock song fades out.” He argues that failing to
note what is at the edge of the frame is an abdication of the photographer’s
responsibility. “It’s avoiding the decisiveness of saying, ‘Here’s the last note.’ In a
photograph, there is always a last note.”4

Time
John Szarkowski: “Uniquely in the history of pictures, a photograph describes only
that period of time in which it was made. Photography alludes to the past and the
future only insofar as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics,
the future through prophecy visible in the present.”5

1 Walter Benjamin used the term “optical unconscious” in his 1931 essay “A Short History of
Photography.” It describes the ability of photography to captures nuances that a spectator cannot
consciously perceive (like Eadweard Muybridge’s galloping horse).
Rosalind Krauss calls these details “parallels to slips of tongue or pen,” through which a person’s
unconscious surfaces into view. Her subsequent question, ”But what can we speak of in the visual
field that will be an analogue of the ‘unconscious’ itself, a structure that presupposes first a sentient
being within which it operates, and second, a structure that only makes sense insofar as it is in conflict
with that being’s consciousness? Can the optical field … have an unconscious?" Rosalind Krauss, The
Optical Unconscious, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994 p.178.
2 “Let’s Get Unconscious,“ Madonna, Bed-Time Stories, 1995.
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, [1921], Bertrand Russell (contributor) and C.K.

Ogden, translator. See http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5740, last accessed: November 26, 2013.

4 Stephen Shore, in an interview with Noah Sheldon and Roger White in: ASX: American Suburb X,
June 2005.
5 John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966, p.10.
Picture Plane
The surface of the print, the screen on which the flattened space is fixed. This
surface is an object—I can touch it—as well as a place for photographic composition,
where the aim is to create the illusion of space or exhibit a lack of depth. Henri
Cartier-Bresson: “The photographer's eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer
can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He
can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera
closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail—and it can be subordinated,
or he can be tyrannized by it. But he composes a picture in very nearly the same
amount of time it takes to click the shutter, at the speed of a reflex action. … One
does not add composition as though it were an afterthought superimposed on the
basic subject material, since it is impossible to separate content from form.
Composition must have its own inevitability about it.”6

I think of the pictorial unconscious as that which is not depicted in the image. The
pictorial plane, then, is the location of (metaphorical) consciousness.
According to this analogy, the subconscious of photography would be the rolls of
exposed film, the contact sheets, hard drives, and memory cards. Storage for
pictures—unpublished, yet accessible.

Any photographer is always thinking about the framing, the exposure time and
composition, the way the space is flattened, or an illusion of depth created. This is
the photographer’s language, her visual grammar. The space beyond, however, is
not as antithetical, as passive as one might think, considering the phrase is a
metaphor for the absence of any kind of language, not even images.

The Absent
How does a photograph point towards the invisible? One could base the history of
photography on the absent. A few examples:

Andy Grundberg on Ansel Adams’ landscape photography: “It shows us a natural

world so precisely ordered and so cleansed of ills that we might suspect it had been
sanitized by a cosmic disinfecting agent in advance of the photographer’s
appearance on the scene”7

6 Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952.

7 Andy Grundberg, Crisis of the Real, New York, Aperture 1991, p.32
Pierre Borhan remarked on the “Distortions” by André Kertész, and on the initial
collective reticence toward his work: “The Distortions are no more mythological than
they are erotic or sentimental, nor more humanist than romantic; so devoid of pathos,
so distilled, they deprived the public of reference points, visual or otherwise …
Kertész’s genius is … that he placed these startling nudes in suspension, outside the
world and outside time. Fragments of an obscure totality, each of these variations
was inscribed in an invisible frame”8

The following are a few concepts of the absent referenced in images:

The abstract, with its pronounced absence of the pictorial.

The informe (formlessness) of Dali and Bataille—entropy of form through

alteration.9

The surreal—not only in pictures made by Surrealists and their study of the
subconscious, but also in the inherently surreal quality of the medium.
“Photography is the only art that is natively surreal“ through “its irrefutable
pathos as a message from time past.” 10

The absurd, in Camus’ sense: the confrontation between the human need and
the unreasonable silence of the world.

Evanescence, a topic not only for Susan Sontag, to whom photographs were
“melancholic objects,” but also for Roland Barthes, who writes extensively
about the stillness of the photograph. For him, a picture taken and removed
from passing time is a reference to death. “For Death must be somewhere in a
society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere;
perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.“11

The announcement of something about to end is what captures my gaze in Robert

Schlotter’s images. The long exposure photographs of old-fashioned amateur movies
fragment time in a different way than Cartier-Bresson's ”reflex action” shots.
Schlotter's photographs appear to be passive repositories in which the moving image
is caught. Movies coagulated into photography, losing their dimension of time; what

8 Pierre Bohan, ed., Andre Kertesz: His Life and Work, Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1994, p.199
In March 1933, twelve distortions were published in the journal Le Sourire, accompanied by a text by
Aimé-Paul Barancy, “Fenêtre ouverte sur l’au-delà” (Open Window on the Beyond).
9 “These objects—psycho, atmospheric, and anamorphic—we have already been told, are complex

reconstructions, made in the dark, of an original object, chosen in the dark from among many others.
The reconstruction, allowed to drop (still in the dark) from ninety-foot eight, to render it unrecognizable
even if able to be seen, is then photographed. Still without being looked at, this photograph is then
sunk into a molten cube of metal, which hardens around it. This reproduced shadow of an unseen
shadow, in the vise of its now inert case, our writer will subsequently refer to as informe, unformed.
Our writer, who can only be Salvador Dali … .", published in: Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,”
October, vol. 33, summer 1985, pp. 31-72.
10 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Picador, 1973, p. 51.
11 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, transl., New York:

Hill and Wang, 1981.

is left on the surface is the light of the projection lamp, bordered by a dark frame. The
images in Memories and How to Get Them, with their eerie quality of a ghostly road
trip, make me think of the passing of time, the “death” of Roland Barthes.

In Alexander Gehring’s Messages from the Darkroom I feel a similar sense of the
softening and transformation of the photographic scene. The analogy of the medium
as person/camera becomes a transgression, a trigger of the uncanny. As form and
transparency alter, preternatural appearances double limited human existence. 12
Red Technicolor light signals that I am on a movie set, in a photographer’s darkroom,
and something is inevitably about to happen. The occult evokes fear and desire, a
psychological undercurrent for that which is absent.13

Privacy by Design, by Norbert Eilers, is the “cloud of fantasy with pellets of

information”14, in serious need of de-ghosting, as I am looking at a stack of layer
upon layer of deceptive appropriation. These familiar, yet completely unrecognizable
images point toward the emptiness that is inherent in a digitally adjusted and over-
stimulated society, stripped of all privacy.

Andrea Grützner’s images throw me into the void of flattened space. The way the
light cuts through the construction reminds me of Gordon Matta-Clark’s chainsaw.
Where his art bordered on vandalism, Grützner’s Erbgericht is like a performance for
herself only, lasting for the fraction of time it takes to fire a flash. An alchemistic
endeavor, looking for gold at the end of the rainbows colors, in an outmoded und
dilapidated Eastern German building.

Immersing myself in her work, I find myself alone with a naked guy in a hotel room.
Paula Winkler’s flash—a specific kind of flash—cheap, amateurish, used in the 1990s
by Juergen Teller or Marcelo Krasilcic to deconstruct fashion photography—discloses
the presence of the photographer. Along with her straightforwardly architectural
composition, the technique effectively dissects voyeurism: present here are an
apparatus and an operator, running an art application. Patterns on skin and patterns
on walls create rhythm, not romance. The space the models inhabit is angular, no
soft bedding or curved pillows for these men.

12 “If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I
'haunt.' (…) Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part,
evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.” André Breton, “Nadja”
Grove/Atlantic Inc, 1960 8 (p.11)
13 “Just a minute,” said Angel, after a moment’s reflection. “Let’s try another experiment. Try for
one whole moment—and be absolutely sincere about it—to completely stop wanting other people’s
desires, and see what happens. Try. But don’t cheat.”
“O.K.,” said Timortis.
They stopped by the side of the road. They psychiatrist closed his eyes, seemed to take a
deep breath and then relax. Angel watched him closely.
Something like a kind of colored crack crept across Timortis’s complexion and features. Slyly
a paler shade of transparency seemed to absorb and take over the visible parts of his body—his
hands, his throat, his face.
“Look at your fingers …” murmured Angel.
Timortis opened his almost colorless eyes. Through the back of his right hand he could see a
black flint glinting on the road. Then, as he pulled himself together again, the transparency was
washed away like the tide and his melting flesh grew solid again.
“There, you see,” said Angel. “When you’re completely relaxed, you just don’t exist anymore.”
From: Boris Vian, Heartsnatcher, Stanley Chapman, transl., Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1968.
14 Sontag 1973 (see note 11) p. 69.
The images can be read in many ways: as a reflection on the process of making
images. As a gender study, a role reversal of the body as object. The virtual space in
which the Exceptional Encounter began, abundant with sexual needs and fantasies,
now absent. Unless the fantasy were to be pinned to a wall, like a butterfly, by a
female photographer’s gaze.

Like the unconscious, the space beyond photography has a way of being present
through its absence. When people look at images, they will imagine space and time;
when they see shallow surfaces, they long for depth, and fill the void with whatever
thought, emotion, or memories well up from inside.