Christiane Feser (Germany, 1977)

The photograph entitled Falten (Folds) shows a monochromatic surface made up of crumpled sheets of white paper that seems to stretch out unendingly far beyond the edges of the image. Close examination shows that the uninterrupted series of ridges and valleys rise to a structure of very unnatural appearance. The points where the individual forms join reveal the unnatural character of their material construction and that fact that this is a digitally generated image.

Feser uses thousands of manually crumpled sheets of A4 paper to create structures that are different every time and photographs them to build up an archive of images, items from which are selected and assembled to construct a vast landscape deeply scored with a whole variety of creases. The quality of the image is determined primarily by light, shadow and paper, which become essential elements of the photograph through a process of extreme formal reduction. Digital composition and assembly turn the individual forms into mobile scenic elements of almost baroque pictorial quality freely arranged as in drapery. Christiane Feser’s images combine sculpture, graphics and photography to attain the end result of absolute detachment from any objective reality. In this sense, her work must be classified as belonging to the tradition of abstract photography. At the same time, she enriches her approach with investigation of the expressive potential of digital processing, which she uses in a slow procedure, sometimes lasting months, to create images endowed with an almost pictorial aesthetic quality. The composition is born when the artist pinpoints a set of structural elements in countless individual photographs and connects them with no attention whatsoever to the norms of realistic physical construction.
Previous works by Christiane Feser also investigate digital photography as regards both its vast technical potential and its presence in media. She uses operations like retouching, superimposing and reversal to combine irreconcilable elements. The alternating interplay of reality and its reproduction reflects the culture of the omnipresent digital image.