¡°Josef Schulz is a photographer¡± |
by Thomas Ruff |
¡°Josef Schulz is a "photographer" of modern
warehouses and factories - trite industrial buildings
that nobody would want to consider to be of any major
architectural interest. All over the world these buildings
are mass-produced, built for all kinds of industrial
production processes using identical plans and blueprints.
Their exteriors offer no hint whatsoever of the specific
purposes for which they are used, their facades vary
only in terms of the materials selected - all of them
pre-fabricated, such as slabs of concrete, corrugated
sheet metal and other cheap building materials.
Josef Schulz does not aim at exposing this architecture
in any way nor does he want to venture into a critical
analysis of its appearance. He simply uses the photographs
of the buildings to study the grammar of his trade.
Schulz starts by taking traditional photographs of the
halls, storage facilities and industrial structures
with large sized photographic plates. Using digital
image processing, the analogue picture produced is then
"cleansed" of the few remaining hints pointing
to age, location or environment of the buildings. All
details that might possibly allow conclusions concerning
the actual size, users, time or place of the buildings
are completely removed. The physical reality of the
buildings is changed in such a way that they seem to
become virtual blueprints designed to perfection. Schulz
focuses on colors and shapes reducing them to simple
block-like structures. Particular emphasis is given
to symmetries, color contrasts and the overall structure
of the image: they thus become dominant components of
the picture. The buildings now resemble toy architecture;
they suddenly appear to be benign counterparts of themselves.
He uses this type of processing to eliminate the gap
between "photographic" and "painted"
reality for the benefit of optimizing the picture. At
the same time, he reverses the photographic process
by reducing the physical buildings to their design concepts
and the photographically "real" picture to
its original "virtual" one. Schulz thus opts
for an approach that is diametrically opposed to that
of producers of digital images - to make the rendering
of artificial pictures appear as real as possible. The
viewer is somewhat confused: he seems to recognize parts
that appear to be authentic without being able to distinguish
whether they were truly located before the camera or
generated with the tools of digital image processing.
By doing so, Josef Schulz distances himself from the
"objectivity" of photography and shows that
pictures are always the construct of the visual power
of imagination of the artist.¡±
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