Trier Photograpy Days: Discoveries, inspiration and a change of scenery

Impressions of the exhibitions: Photographic diversity

It is difficult for me to collect the multitude of impressions and inspirations that visiting the exhibitions has made me experience. And yet some works have particularly stuck in my mind. These include the many documentary works using the unobtrusive gaze of the camera to draw attention to aspects of life that would otherwise be forgotten. For example, in the case of Bárbara Wagner (Viehmarktthermen) with her series “Brasília Teimosa”. The way she captures the colorful life on the beach of the Brazilian port city of Recife reminds me of the photographs of Martin Parr. There is a sweet irony in the pictures, showing how the behavior of middle-class bathers is adopted by the socially disadvantaged population from the favelas. I was also impressed by the series “A Life” by Knut Wolfgang Maron (Stadtmuseum Simeonstift). The artist accompanied and photographed his sick mother. The resulting images are deeply sad and speak of compassion – but at the same time, he also manages to imbue a great sense of dignity when he photographs various objects from her household that would otherwise go unnoticed.

The different photographic technologies and aesthetics are also addressed thematically. There are the Camera Obscura photographs by Luzia Simons (Stadtmuseum Simeonstift). In dark, grainy shots, the motif emerges from the darkness, as if you were catching a glimpse through a keyhole of something that often enough cannot be clearly recognized. Or the black and white works by Vadim Gushchin (Bischöfliches Dom- und Diözesanmuseum), showing everyday objects – a piece of bread, a pair of shoes, a tied-up package. They use strong contrasts to draw attention to their surface structure, as if you were discovering them for the first time. Also instructive are two photographs by Rossella Biscotti and Kevin Van Braak (Stadtmuseum Simeonstift), in which they present a staircase in color and black and white, and thus show how strongly these elements can change perception.

I also remember the digital works, for example by Edith Maybin (Stadtmuseum Simeonstift). In the exhibited series “The Tenby Document”, the artist photographs herself together with her five-year-old daughter and digitally merges their bodies. The resulting images are enigmatic and disturbing. Or the Chimeras by Eva Lauterlein (Bischöfliches Dom- und Diözesanmuseum): empty portraits of young people, created by combining different images. The stiff posture, the absent gaze that passes the viewer by (but to what?) – and then these elusive, disturbing faces: What is wrong with them? The proportions? The misshapenness? The emptiness? In this way, digital image processing techniques, which are so often used to beautify subjects or to technically process data, take on a new, artistic function: they challenge our viewing habits and question social aspects that we consider to be safe.

The questioning of what one sees every day – this is also the subject of Petra Warrass (Bischöfliches Dom- und Diözesanmuseum) in her photographs of stumbling and reeling women in the series “There I sit, quite innocently”. What initially appears to be amusing, embarrassing posture takes on a new dimension when you consider the poses in which women otherwise like to be depicted. What is also interesting is that their faces, which usually attract so much attention, are never seen. Thomas Florschuetz (Stadtmuseum Simeonstift and Bischöfliches Dom- und Diözesanmuseum) contributed triptychs to the exhibition in which he put together three sections of his body – creating unusual but not random combinations.

Fragmentation of the works across four exhibition locations

Yes, it has become a fantastic exhibition that reflects the incredible range of photography – my (also very personal) thanks go to the organizers for introducing me to works worth seeing and inspiring to further explore photography. Nevertheless, I would like to raise a point of criticism that has become increasingly clear to me over the course of the afternoon: the exhibition suffers from its fragmented nature. The works are spread over four locations. In my opinion, this results in two significant weaknesses that I was able to experience first hand today.

First of all, there is the matter of the multiple tickets. A combination ticket, I am told at one of the ticket offices, does not exist – although it is often asked for. So if you want to see the entire exhibition, you have to pay three times for admission – the video installation in the Frankenturm is free of charge. But this does not mean that the exhibition is too expensive: I consider the entrance fees for the museums to be moderate, and even the combined costs are below my pain threshold for photography exhibitions. I love photography exhibitions and am willing to pay considerably more for them than I am for the Photography Days Trier.

No, the actual problem lies in the frustration factor: the division between three locations makes the exhibition seem much thinner than it is. When I talk to the people on site, I often have the feeling that visitors feel the works as too few – even though it is an exhibition that has so far seen little comparable in Trier in terms of its scope. Those who cannot get over their disappointment after visiting the first museum – regardless of which one you started with – would not necessarily go looking for the second exhibition venue.

But this is not the most serious point of criticism: I can well imagine going back to one of the exhibitions to discover previously undiscovered aspects of the works. In fact, however, I believe that it would also be good for the exhibition in terms of content to be concentrated in one place. The spatial separation obscures the interactions between the works. I would have liked to have stood in front of the digital works by Maybin and Lauterlein in turn to explore their different effects on me. I could not, because the works were separated from each other. They would have deserved to be placed in relation to each other in order to more strongly emphasize the different approaches of the photographers. This was impossible for me today due to the splitting – it remains a work that I will do in the next few days with the help of the exhibition catalog.

Update November 19, 2010: It seems that the organizers have now introduced a combined ticket after all.