AURORA NOIR

As a medium, photography combines two conflicting poles: the technical, objective method of recording and the magical moment of light-formed images.

Its designation as The Pencil of Nature (1844-46) by photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot refers to the scientific evidential value of photography. But it was precisely the images of a technical apparatus taken unaffected by human hands that could be regarded as evidence of paranormal phenomena. For example, in circles of 19th and early 20th century Spiritists double exposures and light veils were regarded as evidence of ghosts that appeared in photographs of their descendants. Photography served to communicate with the deceased, was a means of making the invisible visible, a medium between this mortal world and the afterworld, between science and mystery. It is precisely the acheiropoietic character that refers to the religious dimension of photography, as Roland Barthes reflects in La chambre claire (1980): “Perhaps this astonishment, this persistence reaches down into the religious substance out of which I am molded; nothing for it: Photography has something to do with resurrection: might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated Veronica’s napkin: that it was not made by hand of man, acheiropoietos?“

Neither the unrestricted objectivity of photography nor its ability to record ghosts is still believed today. However, these still form a field of tension in which photographs and the way they are viewed move. It remains a fascination how the latent image becomes visible in the darkroom on a white sheet in the developer liquid. It is the moment of a birth – an act of creation: “God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night‘“ (Genesis). The references mentioned are inscribed in the medium of photography and also have an effect in digital photography, which is still a drawing of light.

In the 1970s at the latest, a return of the sacred was observed in a supposedly secular age (The Return of the Sacred, Daniel Bell, 1977). When the Religious Turn was already mentioned, Jürgen Habermas spoke of a “post-secular society”, in which “religious thinking allows itself to be critically presented” (Habermas, 2001). This statement, like that of the cultural scientist Sigrid Weigel, that there is a “interweaving of the secularized world with religious patterns of interpretation” (2004) can be recognized in religious, cultic and mystical allusions in works of a largely profaned art creation and art business.

This exhibition is not devoted to ironic references, as the seemingly spiritistic photo sequences by Anna and Bernhard Blume (e.g. Wahnzimmer, 1985) can be interpreted, or provocative confrontations of explicit religious symbols and depictions with contemporary (photographic) aesthetics, such as David LaCapelle’s series Jesus is my homeboy (2003). Rather, the works shown here are concerned with tracking down the described tension between apparatusic and human observation, between chemical-physical recording and magical charging or interpretation through photography. The exhibition shows works in which the special material and media means and influences of photography are used reciprocally to capture, reproduce and evoke moments that are experienced as magical, alchemical, creative or spiritual.

Cora Waschke