| | | Werner Schnelle
Light Works
Artists Statement
Werner Schnelle
Photographs are always a manifestation of light, where in most cases photosensitive emulsions assimilate the light-reflections and the different degrees of brightness. In the Light Works series, however, I was interested in exploring the reaction of light which directly reaches the emulsion through the lens of the camera. Not only light but also spatio-temporal factors were important.
Contrary to the illustration by means of light my work is concerned with filling a particular space partially with light that immediately finds its way through the lens and the camera to the film-emulsion and creates abstract, spatial photographs. Usually I am working manually with one or more sources of light by means of which I‘m gradually illuminating the space that initially is completely dark. This results in more and more intensive three-dimensional images of light whilst leaving the remaining space dark.
Werner Schnelle
werner@schnelle-photography.at
www.schnelle-photography.at
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Introduction: Light in Space and Time
Margit Zuckriegl
The phenomenon of capturing traces of light in their relation to space and their chronological determination occupies the photographer Werner Schnelle. His previous photographic work has been dedicated to the Polaroid, focusing on the establishment of different and extraordinary criteria for the use of this media – this means for documentation always at one’s disposal: virtually redeeming the Polaroid from suddenness by long-drawn-out staging. He has also experimented with a form of abstract photography, striving for the photographic discourse rather than the superficially sensational depiction of shapes; his double-exposures and solarizations explore the light-like characteristics of photography, without lending too much weight to the representation of reality. The approach of reflecting the media sets the tone of his new works, Light Works. Similar to the photographic work of Sugimoto they challenge both photographic reality and what kind of a reality – however perceived – is created on the photograph.
Schnelle’s latest photographic works are the result of a long and detailed investigation, the foundation of which, on the one hand, is to be found in theoretical basics, the realization of which, on the other hand, is largely determined by a free empirical series of experiments.
In postmodern times the reading of signs and codes has become a natural strategy for interpreting pictures. The creation of specific signs and tracks by means of light can almost be regarded as being a classical part of photo-historical tradition. The photographic work of Werner Schnelle lies between these two factors – the supposed readability of photographs and the language of the light that is generally considered as simple and clear. The different modes of production and perception allow Werner Schnelle to attempt a new approach to this phenomenology: he walks in a dark amorphous room with one or more pinpoint light sources, and creates with this process of moving, and being moved, traces of the dynamics of light by means of long-time exposures. Quick traces of light are the manifestations of luminous paintings displaced in a continuity of space and time.
His images display a peculiar, synthesized reality because they are created artificially: his photographs are plates depicting an extremely graphic interpretation of lineation, dynamic spiral lines, a scattered mist of spotted light, formations of arranged parallel lines, concentrically revolving radii of the wrist, and defined articulations of signs.
The room loses itself in an unrecognizable mystical depth of the grayish black of nocturnal clouds and leaves the projected level of the surface to the language of light. In the visual reality, the three-dimensional perspective – still essential for the process of creating the pictures is now only suggestive of the concept of space. Based on this idea, the traces of ephemeral light are manifested by complex arrangements.
Nothing seems to be more remote from the objective reality than the photographs which simultaneously represent the original contact print and show the verifiable and unchangeable ratio of 1:1.
Beyond calculated effects and planned constructions Werner Schnelle presents us with his Light Works - a series of works which are a contribution to a type of photography that consequently refuses the common postulates of an enlarged reality, on the one hand, and the fast-growing universe of the technical possibilities of digital photography, on the other. As photography generally does, the work tells us about light and its qualities. Above this, it also tells us about memories, transactions in the past, the dimensions of space and time which usually conceal their physical and material presence.
© Margit Zuckriegl - Used with permission
Margit Zuckriegl
Margit Zuckriegl was born in 1955 in Salzburg/Austria and studied art history, archeology and philosophy in Salzburg and Rome. She graduated from the University of Salzburg in 1983, followed by studies in the USA and Barcelona/Spain. She is director of the National Collection of Fine Art Photography of Austria. She has published numerous texts concerning modern and contemporary art. She lives in Salzburg.
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