My photographic
approach to
the world
1.
We humans are born into a foreign world. With our cultural efforts we open up the world for ourselves.
The empirical sciences in particular contribute effectively to this. They explain how reality is structured in detail, they let us see more and more.
As great as the advances in the sciences and the techniques associated with them are, essential questions remain unanswered: What does it all mean? And who am I in this world? We have developed our own cultural efforts for these questions: the philosophies, to some extent also the religions, the literatures and the arts. They degenerate into ideologies when they promise redemption, and into mere decoration when they repeat the all-too-familiar in a pleasing and reassuring way.
Photography as a field of the arts is part of man’s attempts to orientate himself in the world and about his own position in the world. There can be no recipes, proofs or lasting certainties, not even great historical advances. Rather, each generation must bring the questions to life anew and question attempts at answers.
2.
My photography takes up this challenge.
It seeks the mysteriousness of the world. (Every picture says: nothing is the way it is.) It rejects the increasing mass of images that crushes our perception in the mass of consumerism.
3.
It defends itself against the indifferent gaze. It is allowed to show that the world is big and often also lovable (beautiful and good). But a kitsch arsenal (too good and too beautiful) it is not.
4.
One aim: to show edges of the known and breaks in coherences. The effort to let the abysses become perceptible, even those of our reason.
5.
Successful works of art make the world and the recipient permeable. They interweave the fragments of the world.
The images may offer the thin and fleeting reality some support and the viewer a little attitude. Art as self-education.
6.
At best, the photographs give shape to the unspoken, the invisible and the incomprehensible.
Behind this is the idea that everything is connected to everything else: man to animal, bird to stone, tree to the infinity of the cosmos.
“On the surface of an apple I see the whole universe.” (Paul Cézanne) If only that could be achieved for some photographs.
7
Photography can perhaps be a media-reflective renewal of ontology.
Wishing that the images, which are an echo to life and the world, would themselves echo
-.Gerd Gerhardt, January 2022
