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"Recoding Photography"
L.A. Galerie Lothar AlbrechtDomstrasse 6 60311 Frankfurt GERMANY
T: + 49 – 69 – 288687 e-mail: April 11th – June 6th, 2015 |
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 Johannes Franzen ©: Meer, 2015, Serie ›Recoding Photography‹ , 220cmx152cm |
 Johannes Franzen ©: Wald, 2015, Serie ›Recoding Photography‹, 221cm x 141cm |
Images reign supreme these days. They are everything and
everywhere. On Facebook alone, 91 billion photographs were
uploaded last year – or close to 3,000 photographs per second.
The iconic turn has affected virtually all spheres of life and
knowledge. The image, and with it photography, has become an
epistemological tool, even if the relationship between photography and reality may never have been more questionable. It is at
this flashpoint that Johannes Franzen places his new series,
»Recoding Photography«, luring the viewer onto strangely
familiar terrain.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
We are constantly taking pictures, uploading them, applying
them, and in the belief of sharpening our perception of reality we
are actually blocking our vision. The perfection of digital images
– the high resolution, the brilliance, the level of detail – leads us to
believe that they are what they show. The possibility to add a date,
a time, even geographical coordinates as in geotags, delivering
seemingly irrefutable proof of reality, just makes things more
confusing. After all, the simple but profound truth that a picture
of a pipe is not a pipe has not changed.
Image. Text. Image.
While in his earlier works Franzen provided colorful insights into
the DNA of digital images, in his current series he takes a step
further: He now interferes with the blueprint of the pictures. Every
digital photo is coded as a series of numbers and letters; hence
there is a ‘text’ beneath its outward appearance. Franzen combs
through this text with his program code to find patterns and
relations, to unravel these, reorder the image information, and
put all elements back together in a new way.
The Transformation Machine.
Franzen uses prototypical motifs for these code transformations:
Cow, woods, city, nude, valley, sea. His selections are equally
purposeful and random: The viewer is meant to have seen and
recollect these motifs or similar ones from before. Their possible
symbolic significance, depending on each viewer’s geographic or
cultural background, may resonate to a stronger or lesser degree.
Franzen’s program code turns out to be a powerful transformation
L.A. Galerie presents machine.
No pixel is safe from it. »This is not how I know it«, one is
tempted to say looking at the large-format pictures, and then we
start adjusting. The image in our head versus the image on the
wall. If we allow this irritation to happen, allow our perception to
get lost between imagination and reality, we will begin to see in a
new way: The picture on the wall. The cow. The woods. The city.
The nude. The sea. Franzen himself looks on with playful curiosity
as the results of his fascinating manipulations unfold; they may be
calculable, but not predictable. With every new motif he seems to
be exploring again if objectivity and imagination, calculation and
contemplation drift apart exactly at the moment when we ‘get the
picture’ – of the world, of ourselves.
The Divergence of Perception.
Franzen’s work always deals with the premises of human perception. Where are the boundaries between seeing and perceiving?
Which neuronal processes are at play? According to Wolf Singer,
neurophysiologist and long-time director of the Max Planck
Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, »our perceptions are not
isomorphic representations of a reality of whatever kind. Rather,
they are the result of highly complex constructions and interpretative processes which largely depend on accumulated prior
knowledge.«* This means among other things that, paradoxically,
we tend to regard as reality especially that which is the product of
our own interpretation. Our image of the sea, supplied by sensual
impressions, experiences, evolutionary processes as well as
uncountable other images, is not any more real than Franzen’s
picture of it, which is why it seems equally strange and familiar to
us. It is not the seeing itself, but the reflection of it which leads to
an understanding of the process of perception. Franzen’s pictures
can be regarded as an act of philosophizing by other means –
the terrain is only just being staked.
Nadja Mayer, Frankfurt
*
in: »Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder«, Christa Maar, Hubert Burda (ed.),Cologne 2004
The artist will be present
