landmarks

Landscape is set in the picture like a classical painting: The photograph Chicamocha Canyon shows a wide spacius panorama with coherently delineated colours and structures of reddish brown earth at the edge of a deep valley, distant mountain ranges, above a densely clouded sky. Vast, barren, beautiful, lonely – here proximity and distance combine a starting point for daydreams. Destination reached. But an imaginary figure or the expected summit cross at this point turn out to be an unmistakable temporary sign of our time, placed by paragliders on the edge of the plateau to read the wind direction – and to fix our perception again and again exactly at this point. No less symbolic, a fragile architecture rises on the deserted beach of Palomino and mutates at this point into a landmark and poetic cipher, where thoughts can be located and at the same time connected with the open sea and all its connotations. With her subtly selected perspectives, Susanne Wehr succeeds again in subverting our expectations of certain images and motifs and in questioning the code of images handed down through cultural conditioning.

Until now the artistʼs arsenal of photographed memories of selected subjects previously consisted of anonymous slides and prints she found at flea markets and on the internet. As an open system of comprehensive categories, she made these photographs accessible to the public, but here she exclusively brings together testimonies of artistic experiences with a video on photography in film. In a decided interplay of standstill and movement, narrated story, and thematic condensate, she is focusing on what constitutes the fascination and effectiveness of photography.

Dr. Birgit Möckel