1-7,2/6,1993 1993

Art Photography as Painting with Light
 
As a longtime university teacher of communication design, Holzhäuser is familiar with all technical means of photo production, both in practice and in theory. However, for his own artistic work, these are of little or no interest to him. At most, they’re an antithesis to that which he makes himself, because Karl Martin Holzhäuser paints with light.

Light is in fact an elementary component of technical picture production since, without it, there would only be black photos. However, light plays another role for his work because he does without the otherwise customary components, such as camera and film. For Karl Martin Holzhäuser it’s about something even more fundamental. Backing him on this point is a remarkably linear evolution since the late 1960s when he, along with Gottfried Jäger, Hein Gravenhorst, Pierre Cordier, Herbert W. Franke and others started “Generative Photography.” Far from the then superior journalistic photography, or the stagings that came out of fashion photography with their respective subjectivity, Generative Photography was about plumbing the objective elements of photography, to theoretically penetrate them and convey them in actual pictures. For this, one used the camera, but even more so set it aside, went back to the level of the camera obscura and generated photographic pictures with single or systematically ordered apertures. These leaned towards abstraction and were limited in what they reproduced. With this premise, parallel to his job at the Technical College in Bielefeld, Holzhäuser developed his own technique, which, likewise, is cameraless and has much to do with manual operation.

Technically speaking, his light paintings are created by a direct transfer of colors onto photo paper with several light rods in varying sizes which leave behind their traces. These appear after the usual physical-chemical development process. It goes without saying that these pictures are subjectless and in that sense do not illustrate anything that conforms to our daily experience of seeing, Therefore it’s with good reason that Holzhäuser also doesn’t give his photos any descriptive titles, but rather, leaves it to dates and numbers to mark from what period and  work connection they arose.

Of course, flowing into these pictures is the practical experience that has been gained over the years. It requires the constant handling of light sources, color filters and photo paper to achieve the desired results. The resulting images are determined by the respective light rods, the chosen color tones and color density, and from the speed with which the hand makes its practiced motion, and finally, from the distance between the light source and photo paper. (It’s to be noted that Holzhäuser’s understanding of chromatics was lastingly shaped by the color theorist Johannes Ittens.) He makes the complementary colored filter himself out of transparent ink colors, emphasizing the manual element of his work.

Regardless of their abstract appearance, the pictures of Holzhäuser emerge as highly individual artistic products and are extremely precise. For this reason the subjective factor – which at the beginning of Generative Photography was to be excluded – has returned into the work. Color tones and color chords and a great variety of shapes – close to the elementary square and circle – set apart these modern as well as unique pictures. They’re somewhat like Japanese calligraphy in their powerful handcrafted, physical character and their formal simplicity, but they’re based on photographic  principles and therefore not comparable in appearance. As with everything handcrafted and pictorial, the photographic surfaces dominate with their particular aesthetic charm. That makes them a firm element of current art photography.
 
Dr. Enno Kaufhold