image by
August Sander
Bäuerliche Braut. ca. 1921/22
Rural bride
Recently I noticed,
while browsing through the net,
that I react instinctively to images,
where people,
unaccountably,
seem to look different,
than the rest of us.
Image by Nils Orth.
Something is out of order here.
I couldn´t pinpoint my unease and my fascination
until I stumbled over the information that this face is a collage,
a composition put together with photoshop.
Thinking about it,
it might be the deviance from the norm,
that attracts me in these photographs.
Of course,
this could be nothing but the fascination
that make people going to fairs,
looking at dwarfs and giants,
looking at the abnorme,
to get a fright while being in safety.
Maybe it is just my ennui,
my thirst for something new,
while looking at photographs,
that made me stop at these two images.
It also could be,
that it was ta certain feeling of tragedy and sadness that made me halt.
And what about August Sanders photograph?
The bride,
she almost could be called beautiful,
but she isn´t.
She looks retarded,
maybe due to the fact,
that she was moving her eyelids while being photographed,
resulting in a slightly unreal blur
that you wont detect on the screen of your computer.
Thus in both cases,
the technology to transfer reality into an image
is causing the disturbance.
While her groom,
openly looks into the camera,
(but he clearly wasn´t the person August Sander was interested in),
the bride seems to look inwards.
She is moving away,
to a place somewhere inside her.
As she might be thinking,
about that what has been,
and about that what might come,
I do the same.