Curator at the
Münchner Stadtmuseum
Photography Collection

Photography appears as natural as Seeing itself – an unconditional, undemanding activity capable of satisfying us immediately and permanently – at least for as long as we remain content with our innocent amateur status. In his new cycle “_____“, one of a group of works collectively titled “LAND“, private picture worlds – more precisely: photographies from the estates of his relatives and ancestors – provide a point of departure for his artistic involvement. In this, he is not interested in reviewing his own family’s history, but rather in reflecting theoretically on photographic subjects on the basis of amateur photographers’ imaging practice.

The first amateur pictures were made in the 1880s, when new, handy devices and materials made it significantly easier to create photographies. Around the turn of the century, private photography became even more widespread. From the mid-1920s onwards, photography equipment became affordable to the lower social classes, a fact which resulted in an explosion of snaphot-taking.

Marc Baruth’s interest in ancient snaphot images is primarily due to the circumstance that private picture worlds represent a counterdraft of sorts to artistic or professional photography with its very own regularities. Snaphots, mostly deposited lovingly into family albums and carefully captioned, were chiefly private mementos and not meant for public use. Technical standards or motivic presets were only of subsidiary importance.

Pierre Bourdieu has identified the relatives of those taking the snapshots as the central focus of this kind of photographic activity – as a means of stabilising the family’s collective memory. Consequently, snapshot archives mainly consist of portraits of all kinds. It is this genre of images, open air portraits of his family from the 1940s and 50s, that Marc Baruth has drawn on for his long-term project.

Starting with earlier works, the artist has repeatedly questioned the relationship between reality and photography, the manipulability of the latter, and the perception of the photographic image. In the present work, his main  interest lies with the question of what happens to amateur photos when they bare decontextualized by eliminating their actual motifs – people – and leaving only the backgrounds intact.

When the snapshots are transferred into the context of contemporary photographic art, as a result of which the formerly private becomes public, they also change genres: Portraits become landscapes. But do these pictures work as traditional landscape shots in their new context?

Admittedly, amateurs – unlike the pros – did not have to care about picture conventions. However, they were nevertheless eager to avoid crass mistakes as they wanted to „get a pass“ from those who were presented with the prints or slides.

With respect to the shots’ composition, the „snappers“ – at least during the time from which Baruth’s source material originates – usually adhered to the simple concept of positioning not only a person, but also a landscape or piece of architecture into the center of the picture in as focussed and complete a manner as possible. Pictures of architecture or landscapes were designed to strongly resemble picture postcard idylls. As a general rule,attempts were made to create an aesthetically pleasing and representative image of a place or a landscape.

Baruth’s pictures, however, do not operate using this standard – at least for as long as they remain tied to their initial time of origin as well as their former context as keepsakes.

Some images of the cycle, such as Fence I – whose lower half is filled almost entirely with a pristine expanse of snow –, erroneously remind educated viewers of the compositional principles used by representatives of the 1920s’ „New Vision“ or the 1950s’ „subjective photography“ movements. Likewise, the strictly graphical, almost abstract composition of Island or the dominant house wall in House I are reminiscent of these avant-garde styles which once rendered the „banal“ worthy of depiction.

Nevertheless, this reading cannot be applied if the viewer is aware that Baruth’s works are in fact „erased“ portraits, and that what they are seeing are background apparitions which were recorded merely as settings, and which unexpectedly advanced to the position of central image information by means of the transformation process.

In his review of Bourdieu’s theory of amateur photography as a stabilizer of collective family memory, Timm Starl has pointed out that to the uninitiated, snapshots basically amount to hardly anything at all. To their author, they serve as straightforward mementos which even the closest of relatives may not be able to access completely. Their literal meaning cannot be found in the pictures themselves, but in the memories and stories they evoke.

In other words – if snapshots cannot be completely decoded by outsiders, how can this be possible for pictures that do not permit viewers to place them within a historical or biographical framework?

In the knowledge that the images have been manipulated, viewers begin to focus on those sections that Baruth himself denotes as „blank spaces“. Although nothing is really on view, the empty areas attract the gaze. At first, perception is directed towards the medium itself.

Perhaps the uncertainty as to what it is that these blank spaces are actually relating will then invite viewers to insert complementary elements of their own, and initiate a process of remembrance that is experienced as a confrontation with one’s own past.