Interview by LILIAN PFAFF, Editor, tec21, Zürch and PHILIPP KAISER, Curator Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Berlin, February 14, 2000
First published in: Imago, Encuentros de fotografia y video. Junta de Castilla y Leon and El Centro de Fotografia, Salamanca, 2001.
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LPPK: What are the essential aspects that concerned you in your series "Stripping" (1998)?
TH: In general, "Stripping" could be described as consisting of a series of five photographs that are concerned with the positioning of a figure – in this case, a woman – in an architectural context. We built all of the architectural spaces, as film sets, in our studio. In each image the woman is located between an interior and an exterior space, whose borderline is marked by a black band. The figure's proximity to this borderline suggests that she is in two places at once. What mainly interested us was how to use perspective in a photo to say something about a person's psyche or state of mind. We wanted the viewer, who takes the camera's vantage point, to be in the same space as the figure, and thus to be simultaneously close to and distant from her. This idea of a narrative perspective that is both subjective and objective derives from our involvement with various turn-of-the- century authors. Back then it was primarily the young medium of photography that influenced and changed the way writers dealt with space and narrative perspective. In the case of "Stripping," Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" provided the point of departure.
LPPK: All of your previous series focussed on gestures ("Falling Down," 1996, "Holes," 1997) or on persons ("Stripping," "Gregor's Room," 1999). Why have you now gone over to completely empty spaces and facades? Does your "Arsenal" series (2000), the first to be staged in actual spaces, in a cinema, represent a kind of transition to your most recent works such as "Filmstills"?
AB: It really was a transition, because we did this work almost in parallel with "Filmstills." But in "Filmstills" the process is completely different, because now we no longer do production in the studio. In "Arsenal" we used the cinema as a space comparable to that in "Stripping," to describe a figure's psyche. But instead of building film sets, we looked in the cinema for architecture that would characterize the figure. These quite specific spaces, the projection room, auditorium and foyer, always involve transitions, because they provide views into the adjacent rooms. In "Arsenal," the woman is present even in the empty rooms. She is always in the cinema, somewhere. And the audience is never there. They have already left, or are about to come. But nobody else is ever present. For me, it's just a further reduction, a further step. Previously we employed figures, which hinted at a plot. We suggested that there was a before and after. But we try to avoid telling stories that are all too clear. With Cindy Sherman's filmstills you realize what role the female protagonist is playing and how the movie is going to end. We, in contrast, want to let viewers believe that they are in the middle of a story without anticipating the plot for them. In all of our series we included signs that point to a story.
TH: In "Stripping," that was the reason why we placed the woman so close to the black partition – the position on which most depends. Is she above or below, inside or outside the space? Her identity is altered by her oscillating position, which makes it precarious. And maybe she herself is involved in a state of change.
LPPK: In using the cinema as the context for your stories, you chose the place of fiction and illusion par excellence…
TH: The architecture of real cinemas, like the facades in "Filmstills," is fake, faux, since cinema spaces themselves are illusionary architecture. If you walk around behind a cinema, you see that the architecture has a completely different character from that projected by the facade. I think the way we approach architecture in "Stripping" and "Filmstills" is very similar. Although the figures are absent in the latter series, they are still partially present in the filmstills on the posters. Another important thing is that the format of the "Filmstills" relates more to a movie than to a photo format. We chose this format because we wanted to be able to suggest the fictional nature of the architecture. By showing the facade as a filmstill, the photo could be an excerpt from a film. This turns reality into fiction, and the facade could just as well be a film set, as in "Stripping."
AB: For "Stripping," we set up the spaces in a laborious process and altered them again and again, for instance shifting a window or door until we found the best solution. Our handling of the architectural elements in "Filmstills" is based on the same process. We shift and delete parts of the architecture by means of digital image processing and bring them more into the foreground. In other words, we no longer work into the depth of space but only with facades, i.e., superimposed layers of flat planes. Nothing was added to these "Filmstills." The images, photographed in the course of three or four days, were combined and condensed in a way analogous to collage.
LPPK: Why has the motif of the cinema become so important, and how did you select the cinema for "Filmstills"?
TH: It was important for us to dare to take the step outside. It's not a matter of waiting for the magic moment. As during the building of the film sets, we now spend time on site, and wait there with the camera. We photograph the location from a frontal position, showing it in its flattest aspect. Before we started, we checked out over 60 cinemas in Berlin. But we photographed only 12 of them, because only a few were suitable for our pictures. Simple things like a parking zone in front of the cinema were decisive for our choice, because we didn't want anything there to disturb the frontal view of the facade. The idea of superimposing or layering various vantage points in a single image emerged from observing the changes a facade went through over the course of a day. The changing light and mood, or other events like the sudden disappearance of a waste bin, have something eerie about them. We wanted to communicate this eerie undertone in our images. References to the passing of time and the moving picture are inscribed in our "Filmstills." Basically we didn't develop the key aspects of the piece until the work on site began.
AB: By doing without the presence of figures, we place stronger emphasis on the fact that something is happening inside the architecture. What is especially interesting is that these are absolutely empty spaces, which are now filled with a story, a narrative. These are places for contemporary narratives. The architectures were intended to be provocative, to suggest that something went on, or is going on, behind the facades. For this story we used the entire area around the cinema. The episodes of the story seem to filter through the architecture. And the lighted showcases in front of the cinemas function like windows in a facade.
TH: A certain contrast becomes evident when you compare "Stripping" with "Filmstills," because "Stripping" could represent the interior spaces of the latter series. A lot of people will probably see this link. With the exterior spaces we try, metaphorically speaking, to reflect interior spaces as well, which is why we represent the facades with a model-like quality. In addition, by eliminating graffiti, posters and other traces, we amplify this imaginary effect. These interiors, in the sense of psychological locales, recall the film sets in "Stripping" in terms of a similarity of outward appearance.
The fact that you are now working digitally is really a consequence of your having gone outside. It's the reverse procedure, because at first you constructed artificial spaces in a real mode, and then you went out and photographed reality and fictionalized it by artificially processing it.
AB: These pictures we take outside have to be processed to lend them this sense of fiction. The process is basically exactly the same. It extends over a certain period of time, and we take a series of pictures, just as we did in "Stripping." We work towards an image and alter the architecture until we have reached that certain point.
LPPK: A moment ago you spoke of stories that play out behind the architecture. Their occurrence does not necessarily indicate a temporal reference, of course, yet the architecture here doesn't merely serve as a membrane for the narrative but is itself anchored in historical time and a certain place. By the same token, the printed information about the films and the filmstills in the display cases in front of the cinema point to a concrete moment in film history. So why, after the transcendent temporality that dominated in your earlier series and especially in "Stripping," have you admitted this historical level?
TH: That's a good question. I think some of the cinemas in the "Filmstills" series are more specifically linked with their site than others, for instance the "Odeon." Viewers always think this is an American movie theater. The style of a sign can transport an historical level, too. What interests me is that the images have to be read. The textual levels form an additional dimension for the generation of meaning and significance in the image.
AB: Many cinemas have the same name. There is an "Odeon" in Montreal and one in Berlin. Lots of people from Berlin seem to remember the "Odeon" cinema very well, but they don't exactly know where it's located. They have a certain idea about it, but if they were to consciously perceive it, they would be surprised how different it is from their remembered image. So they have an image in their minds that may be quite similar to the image we created in "Filmstills."
LPPK: How important is the relationship between photography and film to you? In "Stripping," the black bands in the sets evoke the film, dividing the photo image into two sections that at the same time might represent an excerpt from a film strip.
AB: Film is so seductive that you're not conscious of its media character. You have the feeling of actually being in the story yourself, not that you're watching a film. I think we are trying to achieve the same thing by entirely different means. This is why we choose a frontal vantage point that cannot be a pedestrian's vantage point. For me this perspective is omniscient; in other words, it is indefinable and exists without an observer. Naturally there are a lot of photographs in which you as the viewer take the observer's standpoint, but this doesn't exist here. In "Stripping," this is achieved by the excerpt, such that you are very close, in close proximity to the object, and also very close to the figure, but there is a distance to the landscape in the background. You have an impossible vantage point, and this lends the image an omniscient perspective. Naturally it was much harder to achieve this effect in the "Filmstills." But we attempted anyway, first by means of the frontality of the picture, and second by means of the various elements we removed. This reduction was intended to create exactly that perspective. For instance, we don't define the place either – is it a city square or a street? Thanks to this, the cinema appears very close up, and above all, objectively depicted. The lack of spatial definition is comparable with a non-awareness of the medium. The experience of looking at the photo image should correspond to the cinematic experience. Nothing should stand between the screen and the spectator. We set out to evoke the experience of film rather than that of photography. In other words, we don't want the viewer to see just a photo of a cinema.
TH: This is why what interests me most about the medium of photography is time, motion and narration. Photography gives me the opportunity to superimpose different moments like a sandwich rather than proceeding linearly, from one moment to the next. The limitations of the medium are especially productive for us, because unlike film, it gives us the opportunity to extract narratives from a sequence.
(Translation: John W. Gabriel)