Portraits

I always had the notion as Walter Benjamin states in “Little History of Photography” that “Standing in front of a device which in the briefest time could capture the visible environment in a picture that seems as real and alive as nature itself is a great and mysterious experience.”

I was captivated by these old photographs presented and reworked in this installation because of the strange human silence the persons in each one of them exuded and also by their gaze.

The series of portraits presented here are meant as an attempt to render them as paintings while trying to reinstate features of portrait painting that the means of photographic art lacks in itself, namely a complete absence of contact between contemporary relevance and historic reality.

The present installation consists of a series of painted old portrait photographs digitally transformed in a series of forms which are transferred through vinyl printing on old handiworks made of cotton cloth. The resulting work is again being deconstructed digitally into 31, 42, 42 and 60 numbered printings on white fine arts cotton paper. Each part of the work the printed handiwork or the 31, 42, 42 and 60 print outs can be considered as an entity or can be viewed as two autonomous works.