Wozu Bilder?

This book accompanying the exhibition at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen is something entirely new: for the first time it attempts, on the basis of historical photographs taken before 1920, to leave the traditional way of looking behind and to focus on the respective functional context. In recent years there has been no serious account of photography without a reference to its documentary character and to Roland Barthes’ “that-has-been.” Indeed, even for art a documentary character was still construed where the images had long since become digital or were subject to manipulation by various imaging programs. It was not only here that it became apparent that the documentary function of the image is embedded in highly heterogeneous and often surprising fields of application – a photograph can serve to remember someone, or to have them sought by the police. So precisely now, when the development of contemporary photography seems to be marking time, it suggests itself to assemble the images quite simply according to what they were needed and used for. To this end the modes of use must of course be described and typologically examined and sorted with historical precision and without any dominance of a perspective derived from the present. This voluminous volume does exactly that and shows what at times strange, puzzling and even curious aims have been pursued with photography in the course of history. One example of the manifold and mutable relations that can be established through photography is the picturing of animals. For a long time photographs of breeding successes played a special role. A mostly male animal – stallion, bull or ram – was presented in lateral pose in front of a white cloth, so that its breed characteristics could be read particularly clearly in profile. The prize-winning animals had to become images so that they could become models for later breeders. For insights of this kind the volume holds many examples from the world of nature, the world of human beings and the world of artefacts, and thereby becomes a voyage of discovery on which the world of photography seems to come into being all over again.

Exhibitions:
Villa Merkel, Esslingen, 15/12/2013 – 16/2/2014
Kunstmuseum Jena, 13/12/2014 – 1/3/2015