The artists in this show wish to represent reality but without being limited by its external appearance. They try to record the objective world without turning it into an impersonal document. They want to photograph a place without being tied to its anonymous or perhaps even surprising data.
We are not, however, dealing with a world cut off from reality: our attention is focussed on urban spaces, internal and external architecture, street corners, all having a definite identity and distinguished by their basic stability. If the artist then slips in some disruptive
element it is due to the desire to push beyond the limits of what it is possible to represent. These elements might be simple images emerging like ghosts to haunt what is well-known, as in the case of Marina Ballo Charmet and Armin Linke; or they might be Sven Påhlsson’s transformation of architecture into unlikely geometric forms, or Davide Bramante’s or Michael Wesely’s subtle visual disorientations. At times the images are a cross between straightforward documentation and metaphorical allusion, as in the case of Thomas Struth and Jean-Marc Bustamante, at others they reveal ambiguous, enchanted constructions, as in the work of Alexander Timtschenko and Roland Fischer. Giacomo Costa multiplies interfaces in order to skew his vistas, while Monica Carocci seems to dissolve her images in mist.
But they never offer us a solution. Instead they suggest a pleasurable sense of loss that is close to being an enigma. Reality and artificiality, truth and falsity come face to face, perhaps influenced by virtual experiences or more simply the unexpected changes of the face of the world. What counts is that photography seems part of this transformation: it is no longer a contingency but the means for seeing or making us see.
