Cold, Clear Pictures
Annette Kelm’s Conceptual Photo
Works
Annette Kelm’s photo works
are as precise as they are hermetic. The Berlin-based artist, who is
represented in the Deutsche Bank Collection with a five-part series, is
considered one of Germany’s most promising young photographers. On the
occasion of her solo exhibition at Witte de With, Tim Ackermann met
Annette Kelm in Rotterdam.
Caps,
2008, 20-teilige Serie
Courtesy
of the artist and Johann Koenig Gallery, Berlin
A
cap is a cap is a cap. At least that’s the way Annette
Kelm sees it. The Berlin photographer did an entire series of
photographs of a baseball cap, plain without a logo, that she found in
Chinatown in New York. The baseball cap isn’t made of fabric but is woven
out of bast fiber. With the series, she evokes both the hillbilly
fustiness of small towns in middle America and the traditional straw hats
of Chinese rice farmers. It is a hybrid object that ultimately cannot be
assigned to any place in the world. The baseball cap is foldable, a marvel
of fashion with only one defect: It is designed so poorly that it falls
off the head of the wearer. "The cap is completely thought-out but it
still doesn’t work," says Annette Kelm. "I like it when things fail like
that."
Caps,
2008, 20-teilige Serie
Courtesy
of the artist and Johann Koenig Gallery, Berlin
Strictly
speaking, her photo series Caps is itself a failure. Kelm
photographed the baseball cap in five different color variations and from
four vantage points in front of a neutral background. So there are a total
of 20 photos. Apart from the fact that the artist imitates the principle
of sculptural three-dimensionality in "flat" photography, the series does
not seem to have any further meaning; it does not meet any of the normal
requirements for this kind of presentation. The series does not illustrate
a temporal progression, does not reveal any further information about the
motif, and does not present a "cap typology" with different variations of
caps. Not even the genesis of the motif as a multicultural consumer
product or the interest of its creator can be discerned from the series.
The reproduced cap is simply a cap. It stubbornly persists in its capness,
so to speak.
Ferienhaus,
Heringsdorf, Maxim Gorkistraße,
Wolgaster
Holzindustrie Aktiengesellschaft, 1900, 2008
Courtesy
of the artist and Johann Koenig Gallery, Berlin
At
first glance, Annette Kelm’s photographs seem cool and somewhat closed
off. Thus, it comes as no surprise that while the artist (who was born in
Stuttgart in 1975) is very friendly, she is also very serious and above
all very careful about the answers she gives. She shows up at the
interview at the Witte de
With art center in Rotterdam, where her first solo exhibition at an
institution is being set up, wearing existential black: a sweater,
T-shirt, jeans. And the questions that her works ask about the medium of
photography are also rather existential. In the last five years, she has
shirked the usual approach in photography. She has made portraits on which
the person photographed is not recognizable; documentary photos that don’t
document anything; pictures taken in advertising photography style, with
old musical instruments no longer on the market. It seems as though she
has done everything wrong. But it was not by chance that Kelm in 2005
received the Förderpreis of the Art
Cologne promoting young artists. The 32-year-old is the big hope among
up-and-coming German photographers; she is paving the way for the future
of conceptual photo art. And of course her works, which run so contrary to
the mainstream, are not bad but in fact very exciting.
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Annette Kelm, To a snail, I / III, 2003
Deutsche
Bank Collection
With Kelm, complex worlds
have to be deciphered: in her cap series, in the photo of a water glass
with a eucalyptus branch, or in the five photos that capture the movement
of a wave on the beach. The artist took the photographs in Majorca in
2003, and today they are included in the Deutsche
Bank Collection. "The wave pictures have something filmic about them,"
she says. "At that time I occupied myself with the portrayal of time."
Despite her diverse interests and her very heterogeneous choice of motifs,
in the meantime a typical Annette Kelm pictorial language has become
apparent: Her photos are cold and clear, as cold and clear as the light
above the autopsy table of a medical examiner. The artist often
photographs the motifs frontally and with immense sharpness of detail. The
photos look meticulously arranged and perfectly illuminated, so that the
shadow they cast is minimized and the subject matter becomes relevant.
Annette
Kelm, Frying Pan, 2007
Courtesy
Johann König Gallery, Berlin
An
emblematic work is Frying Pan (2007), a photo of a Rickenbacker,
the very first electric guitar dating back to 1934. Kelm placed it in
front of the background of turquoise fabric whose staircase pattern is a
kind of a mixture between M.C. Escher
and African folk art. Due to the unusual surroundings, the guitar looks
like an unknown instrument from some exotic culture. "I think it is
important that a picture contains many different references," says Kelm.
"The Rickenbacker appealed to me as a motif because it signifies the
transition from acoustic to electric music." The artist is interested in
transitions, in cultural divides.
Big
Print #1 (Lahala Tweet - cotton chevron,
fall
1949 design Dorothy Draper,
courtesy
Schumacher & Co), 2007
Courtesy
of the artist and Johann Koenig Gallery, Berlin
Ultimately,
Kelm’s interests are the decisive criterion for her choice of motif. She
frequently discovers her subjects through chance observations and
instinctively feels drawn to them. For example, two large-format C-prints
included in the Rotterdam exhibition show photos of cloth patterns by the
American interior designer Dorothy
Draper, the queen of high taste in furnishings and good housekeeping.
Kelm photographs her patterns from the front and in their original size,
so on superficial viewing they could be mistaken for the real lengths of
material. "Draper’s neo-baroque style reminds me of the sets of silent
films in which everything is totally exaggerated: giant clocks, giant
doors, giant cabinets,” she says. "I’m a fan of Kenneth
Anger and the American avant-garde cinema of the fifties and sixties."
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