In 2004 Bettina von Zwehl asked a number of young music students, one at a time, to sit in a darkened and soundproofed photographic studio for ten minutes. A haunting piece of music called Für Alina by the Estonian composer Arvo Part was played to them. She positioned them carefully in a meditative pose, sitting upright at a table, their arms folded gently in front of them, their gaze (though it was dark) directed to a small point in front of them, their eyes cast down. There were no distractions; they were to listen intently to the music and become totally absorbed in the act of listening. Suddenly, without warning, a bright flashlight illuminated the room and the photograph was taken. There was no time to dissemble, no opportunity for the subject to present herself. In the absence of light the black box of the studio space became congruent with the internal space of the subject’s experience, with her mind. In the darkness there is no body, no self and other, no boundary line between inner experience and the objective world.
This carefully controlled, quasi-experimental, quasi-ritualised process of producing an image suggests a particular metaphysic of the photographic. Eschewing any simple notion that the photograph might simply represent the body von Zwehl’s practice foregrounds the indexical moment at which the photograph is taken, and it is the actual act of taking the photograph, the searing light of the flash breaking the darkness, that produces the body: in that moment of illumination the darkness of an interior space is split apart to expose the body in all its physical vulnerability as a text to be read, inscribed in the field of the visible. This, then, is a photographic project that poses a profound and ancient set of questions about the relationship between inner experience and the external world, between subjectivity and objectivity, and between mind and body. It proposes the photograph as a sliver of time/space operating as a kind of transition point between the two. A site at which, subject to the most careful and meticulous control, the one might just become visible in the other.
- Joanna Lowry, Extract from the essay 'Symptoms, Signs and Surfaces' from the Monograph 'Bettina von Zwehl' (Steidl/Photoworks, 2007)
This carefully controlled, quasi-experimental, quasi-ritualised process of producing an image suggests a particular metaphysic of the photographic. Eschewing any simple notion that the photograph might simply represent the body von Zwehl’s practice foregrounds the indexical moment at which the photograph is taken, and it is the actual act of taking the photograph, the searing light of the flash breaking the darkness, that produces the body: in that moment of illumination the darkness of an interior space is split apart to expose the body in all its physical vulnerability as a text to be read, inscribed in the field of the visible. This, then, is a photographic project that poses a profound and ancient set of questions about the relationship between inner experience and the external world, between subjectivity and objectivity, and between mind and body. It proposes the photograph as a sliver of time/space operating as a kind of transition point between the two. A site at which, subject to the most careful and meticulous control, the one might just become visible in the other.
- Joanna Lowry, Extract from the essay 'Symptoms, Signs and Surfaces' from the Monograph 'Bettina von Zwehl' (Steidl/Photoworks, 2007)