The Montage Artist

No one in the German art photography scene has dedicated himself so exclusively to photo montage as John Schuetz. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut and in 1971 came to Berlin, where he has lived and worked ever since. Photo montage began in the early period of photography when new pictures were created by putting together various cut-out elements. It experienced it’s zenith in the 1920s when artists such as Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann and El Lissitzky updated the practice. John Heartfield became particularly famous for it. He perfected montage for political posters and the title pages of worker illustrated newspapers. Schuetz knows he’s connected to the tradition of this era. He however uses the technique in a less narrative way and not at all for agitation. He developed it further both practically and artistically and gave it an entirely new quality.

Objects and Structures are Combined

His photo works are applied in series with different variations and initially come across as objectless and abstract. They are nevertheless very realistic. It’s because John Schuetz, like every other photographer photographs the objects that he wants to use for his montages with slide film(a point which, in light of digital photography, must be stressed nowadays). Therefore, light, space, movement and time mark the coordinates in which he moves entirely like a photographer and in which he photographs different motifs from changing angles. Objects that interest him could be chairs, water hoses or wood surfaces. Unmistakeable is his grasp of material. He takes his slides to his light table, a large milky sheet of glass that’s covered with scissors of every shape and size, surgical scalpels, tweezers, magnifying glasses, rolls of tape, uncut slide film and a pile of film remnants. The cutting of the slide materials begins at the light table, starting from drawn sketches. The properly cut pieces of film are then put together piece by piece on a glass plate the size of a hand. The montage results in a large slide from which an enlargement will be made on photo paper. Differing from it, but still referring to a background in reality, are the LUMAS editions from the series Deadlight - Deadpan (DLDP) and Faultlines. Schuetz used found material for this – old black-and-white glass plates that he brought back from a trip to London. As expected, the decades-old, unexposed glass plates showed interesting signs of age. In the course of years the plates had “developed” in a way because the gelatin with the transferred silver had chemically and physically reacted to temperature, air moisture and air pollutants. Time, an entirely elementary factor of photography, reproduced itself without the use of camera optics. Schuetz duplicated the aged glass plates onto black-and-white film and then, in combination with various colored slide film material, assembled them on the light table.

Calculus in Chaos

Knowledge of the applied technique shows the way, and so Schuetz arrives at his pictures, if not the respective contents. From the beginning, a substantial characteristic of his montages was the disregard for views with central perspectives. By abolishing the orderly view of a clearly recognizable front and back, he created illusionary presentations of space that have an initially unsettling effect upon the viewer. The same applies to the geometrically structured pictures of the series Deadlight - Deadpan (DLDP) and Faultlines. Assembled in fragments, they show the traces of time, such as transience. In their aesthetic composition with lines and sharp corners, the pictures recall the Bauhaus aesthetics’ clear, constructivist, abstract character (Paul Klee’s abstract color paintings in particular come to mind). Very obvious is that the delicacy of the photo’s color is an important, even emotional component of the completed, formal design. Without a doubt, the personal mood and the intense expressiveness of Schuetz work together and generate a distinctive artistic signature. It speaks for the authenticity of the works, which are harmonious with their author. A true life pulsates in these pictures, transferred into solid artistic form. In respect for the unexplainable and in order to leave the viewer free reign of interpretation, an analysis of the photos shouldn’t go further.

Dr. Enno Kaufhold