To a large extent, contemporary photography looks the way it does because of two major revolutions. The first, originating in the US in the 1970s, not only made colour photography the dominant image mode, but also opened up new ways of seeing. The second, originating in Düsseldorf, Germany, very forcefully also made us see things in new ways. Thankfully, there are now two new books that talk about these two revolutions. The first, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980, I reviewed last week. The second, The Düsseldorf School of Photography is the subject of this review.
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“I have progressed. Axel Hutte, Thomas Struth or Candida Hofer, for example, still all work on specific subjects for certain periods. But in my case I don’t distinguish between one area and the next - for me it’s much more of a slow process. But I also think that if you compare me to Thomas Ruff, you can see that he has moved on as well because what he is doing is maybe more like the work of a scientist who is trying to find out what the essence of photography is.” - Andreas Gursky
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A recent New Yorker review (13 and a half lines - a snippet, isn’t it?) of Josef Schulz’ show at Yossi Milo gallery concludes that his “pictures of sites reduced to abstractions […] might suggest an ominously faceless future if they didn’t look so much like relics of the digital-photography boom of the nineties.” That did strike me as an oddly superficial reading of those images - not that I want to pretend that my initial reaction to seeing the prints (I was quite familiar with the images from the web) was any less superficial: It almost seemed to me that what Schulz had achieved was to take almost all of the ingredients often associated with the “Düsseldorf School” - the sterility, the human detachment, the willingness to digitally manipulate, even down to the diasec and the large prints - and had them distilled into a single body of work: And it doesn’t work. The images are nicely decorative (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but for me they don’t seem to offer anything else. Which means that all those Düsseldorf ingredients really are (actually: should be) only means to an end, and what truly matters is not what the photography looks like, but what it says.
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