ON THE INVISIBLE IN PHOTOGRAPHY

Coincidence and incontrollable elements are the most important aspects for the young photographer from Hamburg, Falk von Traubenberg. He has recently become a member of the artist group Konkrete Fotografie (Concrete Photography), which has been tracking the automatic creation of images since the 1950s. His series, made in Frankfurt, helps us come one step closer to the problem.

Before von Traubenberg arrived at photography he had been trained as an architect, which one can still see in his work today. Details of house facades and street views, falling lines, fragments, strong contrasts and bright colors give the images a technically disciplined appearance. Like in a collage, the individual layers are placed upon and woven in one another.

The results of his artistic vision seem almost abstract – but only almost. Day-to-day realities of the city are never completely lost. This oscillation between abstraction and reality takes place again in the creation of the images. Von Traubenberg purposefully reveals to the viewer the tension between analog and digital photography, a combination that is rare today. The camera still has a role to play, and yet it is not the decisive tool in the creation of his work but rather a first step.

Von Traubenberg’s raw materials are exposed analog slide film, some of which show Frankfurt’s distinctive skyline. These films, however, are so severely over- or under-exposed that one can hardly recognize what is pictured; they are almost completely black or completely white.

These slides are finally digitally scanned, but the lack of recognizable objects on the nearly monochrome surface causes the scanner to "invent" and augment the image with color spaces of its own. What is actually an error is exactly what von Traubenberg wants in his works. The invisible is translated into color fields, overlaid with architectural fragments: an intricate structural weave.

Daniela Perak