Camera Austria International 164 | 2023

The impending climate disaster is making an examination of the ecological conditions of photographic production more topical than ever, as is currently reflected by countless exhibitions, publications, and discussions. Hence, light is being shed in recent times on the contexts surrounding the production of photographs, and on the environmental harm associated with the medium’s development, in both analogue and digital form. Many of the artists featured in this issue of Camera Austria International have long been navigating this realm, each in their very own, ever-poetical way—making processes visible that otherwise remain concealed from the human eye.

With recourse to pictures of the Earth as a “blue marble,” taken from outer space and quite revolutionary in the late 1960s, Annika Toots examines how Kristina Õllek contrasts this distanced view of the world, which has long been characteristic of the environmental movement, with an approach that homes in on the tiniest particles and organisms. In her oeuvre, the artist moves more and more into areas that remain hidden from the human eye: “Kristina Õllek’s art is deeply rooted in questions of representation in the digital age, but over the years, it has grown a material layer composed of seawater, limestone, metal, clay, bioplastic, sea salt crystals, fossils, and other related forms that tap into the matter(s) of desire, time, and the anthropocentric impact on our ‘blue marble.’”

Anaïs Tondeur likewise devotes her attention to making visible transient phenomena usually caused by human activity, which she then embeds in interdisciplinary contexts and experimental photographic processes. “At the foreground of her practice are elusive elements of the climate (but also of us), namely, radioactive traces, soot particles, waning plants, a prehistoric whiff, human tears—all pointing to the intricate inextricability of our bodies and the world,” as Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou notes in her essay on the artist. Tondeur returns again and again to historical photographic materials and techniques, which she then adapts to her projects. In other works, such as in her current project Soils Testimony (2023), the artist literally transfers soil that was contaminated with silver, plastic, and bromine by the Kodak company in Vincennes near Paris into photo­graphic works.

Taking Laure Winants’s current project Words from a Tongue We Are Losing (2023, in conversation with the artist Patrick Blenkarn) as a point of departure, Duncan Wooldridge explores what it means to conduct research and to make photographs in the Arctic with a transdisciplinary team. In her multimedia-based and collaborative practice, the artist ties into a long-standing scientific tradition of cap­­­turing the optical and luminous phenomena of this region and of probing the ways ecological systems are interrelated. “ Images, we are prompted to remember, emerge from a cloud of sensitivities: our own, those of the apparatus, and those of conditions beyond the human. We are a part of its coming into being.”

The author Taco Hidde Bakker views Claudia Rohrauer’s working approach as one that “seems to combine theory and practice, down to the last visible granule. It’s as if the productive (and sometimes counterproductive) friction between the two manifests itself in this imprecise superimposition, like a moiré effect.” From here, the conversation between Bakker and Rohrauer turns to sustainable darkroom practices, touching on an ongoing series of algae phytograms, on a shifting of plannability relations (as inscribed in this working method) toward chance—“Indeed,” notes the artist, “the unexpected and uncontrollable is essential for the artistic process and the work’s development.”

Margit Neuhold, Christina Töpfer
November 2023

Cover: Laure Winants, detail from: Fieldwork in the Arctic, 2023. Dichroic filters and light sensors.

Language: English / German
Size: 30 x 21 cm
Binding: softcover
Publisher: Camera Austria, 2023