by oettrich

à table, 2012/13

In der Weiterführung meiner mehrjährigen Auseinandersetzung mit filmischem Quellenmaterial richtet sich mein Fokus in dieser Werkgruppe auf eines der immer wiederkehrenden filmischen Topoi: des Zusammenkommens von Menschen an einem Tisch. Der Tisch…
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by oettrich

scenes, 2011

[gallery type="rectangular" link="file" size="large" ids="41,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,42"] In the last few years, Dorothee von Rechenberg has focused primarily on black and white photography. She is composing her photographs within series (e.g. recut, 2009, insomnia, 2008, songline, 2007). This working method obviously has a strong relationship to the aesthetic and narrative principles of film; by grouping situations in a line, she evokes the narration of a story or the spatial relation of objects and characters. However, the way of ‘story-telling’ in the images of Dorothee von Rechenberg is very different from that of traditional films. Since 2010, Rechenberg has been working on her series scenes based on the technique of digital montage. As source material she is using old movies which she photographs during a DVD projection. She explains:“I take the photos while watching a projected film. This is an essential part of my photographs: to capture specific moments while the film is running (absolutely not a screenshot!). I want to fix a moment of movement (in a physical and also psychological sense) and to show the movement even in this frozen moment. Afterwards I create absolutely new settings with my footage on my computer. Therefore I use a lot of different photographs (sometimes only a single detail of them) to compose my scenes. The photographs I use for the compositions need not only come from one specific film but from various other films. What is important is the interaction between the different parts which thus become a new whole. Rechenberg is putting these photos into new arrangements and combinations, rarely also employing elements from her own photographs. She is alluding to the atmosphere of old films both in her motives and in the black and white visual style (even though some of the source films are colour films). The captured old-fashioned objects, furniture and persons evoke a sense of nostalgia. Most of the persons are depicted from behind. In this way, the figures in scenes are becoming something like a representative for the spectator, seducing him to enter the visual world of the images and to follow a hallway, a staircase or their view out of a window. In doing so, the spectator is arriving in a ‘nowhere land’, highlighted by zones of bright light, or is glittering onto a darkened ground and shadowed areas. The spectator is unable to find any visual sign to fix his viewpoint, like he can do in classically constructed perspectives. The window the woman in scene 8 or the man in scene 7 is looking through is in a way re-inversing the view on its starting point: the viewer.
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