Gerhard Stromberg - Two Moons
25. February 2000
Just as much as I want to work in landscapes which are more complex in their structure than most of the ones I have photographed over the last years, I have also been trying to make pictures of more enclosed situations. Very few have succeeded.
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One of my biggest fears in picture making is not to transcend the subject matter I depict. I know, most beholders will never be able to look beyond the reality of which a photograph is taken; but then, isn’t the same true about most people looking at figurative paintings? It requires trust in a picture to see it as something completely new rather than as the representation of visual reality.
Out of this fear I am still most comfortable with multi-layered, ambiguous subject matter; where everything is possible nothing specific can be assumed.
In photography nobody has solved this problem better then Bernd and Hilla Becher. All their pictures are about very particular structures and yet they effortlessly transcend their subject matter and face us as something new, something we never have seen before in our life. It rings so true when André Malraux writes “Cezanne does not want to reproduce apples, he wants to paint pictures ...”.
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