Bleu

My main question was, while I was working on the series Blue, was how can I make the viewer feel distant from the reality. To reach this impression, I started to work with the technical tools of taking photographs with flash lights. Most of my pictures I took are night-life scenes with a basically strange milieu. The foregrounds of these photos became clearly and sharply lightened by flash, but the backgrounds stay almost fully in darkness, The pictures are dealing with the theatrical sets, and nearly surrealistic atmospheres. As the shots are similar to movie stills, they can also be read as variant narrative lines with different interpretations. The photographs have a typical (blue) cold tone, that reflects on the strangeness, the scenicallity and the artificality. The title of the series deals with the different meanings of the English 'blue' and the French 'bleu', which are parallel to the various readings of my work.

The series was inspired by genetic mutations: how DNA code transformation can deform living creatures. To visualize this process I used stuffed animals exposed with the help of a scanner. By using this technique the animals are put in a picturesque lighting, which makes them seem alive. Due to the long exposure processing, fine visual glitches appear on the bodies, considered as a possible visual interpretation of genetic mutations. The specks of dust around the bodies are the dust of the living material of the creatures, and as such carry the entire genetic material.

The series starts from a personal story, I'm examining how body-soul-and mind injuries are interdependent and interconnected can be. My interest was lying in how to portray mental injuries and visualize an internal elusive state. I study the extent to which introspection draws general lessons that affect us all. How individual and social injuries rhyme. How fragmentation or deficiency turn into a story perhaps into history and creates information surplus. What does the decline of civilization say about individual suffering, how does it manifest in the soul of the individual. To express this, I started out with scars and bruises which could represent an allegory of wounds in the soul. The base content, containing photos about bruises, is being supplemented by additional pictures from my photo diary. Furthermore, the thread of thought is being extended both in time and space by cultural and art historical references. The result is an atmospheric set that induces association and interprets the concept based on different aspects. By this, beyond the personal level, a more general message is also being formulated. An important part of the series is that it doesn’t uncover the infliction of pain. It remains on the level of visual implication, focusing the meaning on the soul.