Andrea Grützner: Erbgericht (E)
for Foam Talent Magazine
2016
related works
Erbgericht
As counter intuitive as it might seem at first, Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (which I have seen translated as either distancing effect, alienation effect, or estrangement effect) finds its role in the world of photography. It is true, there is a machine, the camera, with which an image is made. But that image – the photograph –is produced in a conscious effort by the machine’s operator who makes a series of decisions concerning the outcome. In his 1966 book The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski discusses five specific characteristics (the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point), most of which can contribute vastly to what in the picture looks significantly different than what might have been in front of the camera’s lens: a short moment of time is frozen forever, and through its framing, the photographer’s location as well as his attention, a picture arises that might surprise, startle, or challenge the viewer. Consequently, in the Brechtian sense, he or she might be prevented from easily identifying what is being depicted, instead giving him or her a chance to see the world in a much different way (if not forcing it outright). This is, after all, how photography can be art. And this is what good art does. The inn Erbgericht Polenz is located in the small Saxonian town of Neustadt, not far from the Czech border. Perhaps not surprisingly, the town’s website makes it look like pretty much any other German municipality of that size (there are less than 13,000 inhabitants). If you were to travel to Neustadt, you could stay at the inn, assuming its website (which looks as if it had not been updated since roughly the mid to late 1990s) won’t deter you. I will admit that I would have never looked up either Neustadt or the inn itself, if it had not been or the photographs that Andrea Grützner took there.
Grützner’s photographs are perplexing and bewildering, and I mean this in the best possible way. What we are made to look at, and how the photographer produced the picture, isn’t always that clear. The photographs’ two- dimensional planes are obviously highly organized, but the underlying principles are not overly transparent. Our sense of space is becoming verfremdet – were I to travel to Neustadt, to stay at the inn, would I see what I am being made to see here? I’m not sure. I’d like to think not. What makes Erbgericht interesting for me is that its visual strategies appear to be as grounded in the currently hot trend called New Formalism as in much older ideas tied to photographic modernism. I’m tempted to think that artists such as Alexander Rodchenko or László Moholy-Nagy would enjoy these photographs just as much as adherents of New Formalism. After all, angling cameras in seemingly bewildering ways contributed a lot to what made photographic modernism exciting and what still, to this day, maintains its large appeal (unlike, say, the photograms, which now look positively dated). Concerning Rodchenko or Moholy-Nagy, it’s not clear to me how they would react to most of the New Formalist work that is currently being fêted so much. In an obvious sense, this is a moot point, given how far photography has evolved since its modernist era. But still, in another sense it is not, because such large parts of New Formalism appear to be so oblivious to the larger themes that modernists dealt with, themes that went far beyond the medium of photography itself, in particular the role photography can (possibly should) play once it is taken out of its own playground. It is no mean feat to produce a series of photographs that in this day and age can confound a viewer. As I already noted, Grützner’s Erbgericht succeeds in doing that. But the confounding comes with a large amount of delight as well, in terms of the photograph’s formal beauty, but also concerning the invitation for the viewer to solve the riddle presented: in what way is the space being described here? Having solved that riddle won’t release the viewer, though, given that upon revisiting a picture already seen before, the same riddle presents itself anew, without having lost its initial appeal.
Just like in the case of a little child that simply will not stop being fascinated by the same thing over and over again, these photographs offer themselves up to be enjoyed again. The viewer thus becomes transported back into a state where seeing the world is completely enjoyable in the most innocent way again: we might have seen thousands of pictures today already, but these ones here, this Erbgericht – now these are very different beasts!
JÖRG COLBERG – (b. 1968, DE) is a writer, photographer and educator. Since its inception in 2002, his website Conscientious has become one of the most widely read and influential blogs dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography. He is also a Professor for Photography at Hartford Art School.
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