Henry Landers | Artworks and Insites

1st aspect: Photography technique

IMAGING TECHNOLOGY: Analogue process

The basis is a black-and-white image that I took with a Nikon FA and a 24mm lens, with a red-orange filter, on T-Max 3200 film with a +2 exposure factor, developed 2° warmer and approx. 2 stops longer. The result is a very rich 35mm negative with a pronounced, large, plastic-like graininess and relatively soft image contrast, as I used, for example, for the series X CAPITALS and THE BALLET OF MIRROR NEURONS. Prints: with moving white nylon stocking filter, in 18 x 27 cm format, on ORWO BARYT BRILLANT BBW

IMAGE TECHNOLOGY Digital process

1. I now scan the black-and-white negative directly from the film using a film scanner: Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED, with a resolution of 4000 dpi at 16 bits in the RGB color profile, and save it as a TIF file (approx. 53 MB).

2. I select the section of the image that best combines my image idea and the structure of the grain.

3. I assign special color profiles that I have created myself in Photoshop / Gradations / RGB channel to the cropped image section.

4. Like a crystal, I now let the grainy structure in the negative grow when scaling with the scaling app: ONE 1 Resize 10. In detail, I do this depending on the size of the image sections in 13 to 29 scaling steps, whereby the formats circulate irregularly, between even and odd dpi values. Size of the image sections in 13 to 29 scaling steps, whereby the formats increase in an irregular cycle, between even and uneven dpi sizes and tenths and hundredths of a centimeter image height (e.g. in steps of height 3.43 cm and image resolution 2929 dpi to height 3.6 cm and image resolution 2901 dpi ...), up to the full format (2-4 GB). - As I used it, for example, for the series: MANNIGFALTIGKEIT (DIVERSITY) and EGO-SHOOTER CROSS THE WORLD. Prints: Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle FINE ART BARYTA.

2. ASPECT: IMAGE GRAIN

The grain combines content with aesthetic symbolism to question our view of everyday reality on a sub-elemental level. I view reality as a pulsating phenomenon. Put simply, our reality pulsates in very short cycles. It arises from ‘emptiness,’ exists until its completion, and then disappears back into ‘emptiness.’ Then the next sequence of reality follows, and so on. However, this happens within a complexly interwoven process in which all states act simultaneously and give the appearance of a continuous presence within the laws of nature known to us.

In my pictures, I try to capture the moment when the previous impulse of reality has faded away and its emerging form has not yet been fully articulated. The surfaces are not yet closed, the focus is incomplete, the colors are still developing, and it seems as if the view is still open enough to see behind the mask of what we call reality. In superstring theory, I found both inspiration and a scientific reflection of my own imagination, although my thought process beyond that was completely undisciplined.

According to physicists Calabi and Yau, the 11-dimensional ‘space manifolds’ they describe are anchored symmetrically in four dimensions at a distance of one Planck length “space.” According to their thesis, each 11-dimensional ‘space manifold’ contains the four dimensions (three spatial dimensions plus one temporal dimension) that make up our three-dimensional world. I symbolically represent these 11-dimensional ‘space manifolds’ with the graininess in the image in my black-and-white photographs.

2. ASPECT: IMAGE GRAIN

The grain combines content with aesthetic symbolism to question our view of everyday reality on a sub-elemental level. I view reality as a pulsating phenomenon. Put simply, our reality pulsates in very short cycles. It arises from ‘emptiness,’ exists until its completion, and then disappears back into ‘emptiness.’ Then the next sequence of reality follows, and so on. However, this happens within a complex, interwoven process in which all states act simultaneously and give the appearance of a continuous presence within the laws of nature known to us.

In my pictures, I try to capture the moment when the previous impulse of reality has faded away and its emerging form has not yet been fully articulated. The surfaces are not yet closed, the focus is incomplete, the colors are still developing, and it seems as if the view is still open enough to see behind the mask of what we call reality. In superstring theory, I found both inspiration and a scientific reflection of my own imagination, although my thought process beyond that was completely undisciplined.

According to physicists Calabi and Yau, the 11-dimensional ‘space manifolds’ they describe are anchored symmetrically in four dimensions at a distance of one Planck length “space.” According to their thesis, each 11-dimensional ‘space manifold’ contains the four dimensions (three spatial dimensions plus one temporal dimension) that make up our three-dimensional world. I symbolically represent these 11-dimensional ‘space manifolds’ with the graininess in the image in my black-and-white photographs.

Similar to Plato's prisoners in the cave, the beings depicted in the screen world also consider the low-dimensional representation to be the entire reality. If one could ask both the cave dwellers and the screen dwellers about this, both would claim that their low-dimensional reality is the only truth. Since humans are undeniably the creators of these realities, both in the case of the screen world and in the case of the shadows on the cave wall, this image can serve as a comprehensible way for us to visualize the reality we experience.

If the screen creatures were able to look back in the direction from which they came, as Plato suggests in his allegory of the cave, the same thing would happen to them as to the people in Plato's cave, and they would see a seemingly strange shimmering white.

However, the screen beings can neither recognize themselves nor step out of their screen world, as the people in Plato's cave could. They would encounter a labyrinth of transformations that converts light into electrical signals and even electromagnetic waves.

Strictly speaking, there is no physical connection between the world of the creator, our world, and the world of screen creatures. From the perspective of screen creatures, the information from their screen reality appears to come out of thin air or from nowhere, but in reality it comes from a higher dimension. Here, our mental image, viewed from the perspective of our own experience, leads us to imagine what a connection between a lower-dimensional and a higher-dimensional space might look like.

In the direction of the source of their appearance, the screen people would not be able to discover any actual reality. Instead, they would find a luminous mask composed of three colors of light, a material universal matrix representing differentiated states, which in turn are interpreted as material because they are provided for in the ‘script’ of these beings and in the construction of the matrix. Even the shimmering white light would, on closer inspection, prove to be a multicolored illusion

Surprisingly, the etymological origin of the word ‘screen’ leads us to a fireplace. In the 14th century, a fine mesh was installed as a ‘fire screen’ to protect against sparks from the fireplace. Generations of ‘spectators’ watched the fire, exchanged stories, and gazed expectantly through the screen at the flickering flames. The moving shadows and dancing flames stimulated their imagination.

PLATO'S SHADOW PLAY OF APPARENT REALITY, WHICH APPEARED SO CONVINCING ON THE CAVE WALL, WAS ALSO PROJECTED BY THE LIGHT.

The ‘fire screen’ developed in a unique evolutionary history from the shadow grid in front of the fireplace to the shadow mask of a television cathode ray tube and then to the three-color LED matrix that can be found in every television, smartphone, laptop, and almost everywhere today. Many perceive this virtual reality as the actual reality of our present.

The big difference between my image and Plato's allegory of the cave is the viewer's open perspective. Plato imagined a solid cave wall on which perceived reality was depicted as a shadow play.

I extend Plato's concept to the development of space in a higher dimension that eludes our understanding and is perceived by us as deepest black or darkness (dark matter, dark energy). Even the people captured on the screen would, if they raised their gaze to look in the direction of their viewers, see a black void. They would first see their own shadows on the screen wall and then look behind it in the direction from which they are seen by their creators.

If we consider this mental image once again, our three-dimensional reality could even be caught between two higher-dimensional realities. They would be generated on one side and observed on the other. Both directions elude their perception. Black and white - white where we come from and black where we cannot go.

The time we count so meticulously takes on an exclusive meaning in my picture. In my opinion, time is a kind of synchronizing lubricant on which reality slips away. If the lubricant of time did not exist, reality would become distorted, with unforeseeable consequences in the universe we know. Perhaps ‘black holes’ are such distortions of space.

My black-and-white photographs are therefore primarily concerned with grain, its symbolism, which I associate with the form of a universal materiality from which diversified states are created, and not with the mundane image that appears on them.

The image merely reports on the place to which photography led me in my physical and spiritual presence in our reality.

In her essay on photography, Susan Sontag writes that photography depicts a world that is coming to an end, that there is no salvation for this world. And she writes of the death of the moment that is photographed.

From my point of view, however, photography participates in a process of reality that carries our gaze into the future like a Formula 1 racing car speeding by. I search for an inkling of what the coming, perfecting reality might look like. In my black-and-white photographs, I seek to make visible a fleeting premonition of the future.

Our ideas and emotions alone steer this process towards good or less good, towards life or death, and towards success or failure. In my reflections, I contrast this process in two metaphors. It is ‘the romantic spectacle of the pyromaniac fireworks of failure’ that contrasts with ‘the modesty of fulfilment.’

IDENTITY AND ANONYMITY IN INTERACTION

Photography, as I understand it, requires the unconditional presence of the photographer. It takes me through the world, through intercultural spaces, provoking interpersonal actions to find ‘the third correspondence,’ which I believe is closely connected to natural femininity. No other artistic form of expression requires the simultaneous presence of the artist and the subject in one place as much as photography. That is why I chose photography as one of my forms of expression.

Henry Landers 2013