Proof of Concept

 


I spent some time in Germany last month. Excited to visit the country that produced the most interesting photographers of the last two decades, I was anxious to catch of glimpse of a new generation of photographers that tailed talent like Candida Hofer, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Demand.

A day of running about the Mitte, I discovered most galleries were, in fact, featuring photography. But what Berlin offered in quantity it lacked in quality. Most exhibitions struck me as incredibly derivative , or otherwise hollow.

The notable exception was Torste Solin's show at KOMET This image, featured in Photography Now, caught my attention. The predictable sexual formula of cartoonish eyes and large, milky breast was neutralized by this grotesque hairless mammal draped around the model's neck. Even though I was braced for some type of horrible Heavy Metal>esque soft-core porn shots, I had to check it out.

Entering Komet, I was surrounded by Solin's "Dolls" heavily distorted and airbrushed babes, like the Strawberry Short Cake Dolls of my childhood: each woman was paired up with her own pet.

Solin's aesthetic resides neatly in the center of the content of his work, that is the hyperbole of sexual signifiers. Solin's does sexy so well, in his images it morphs into comic and grotesque and then does a juicy hip swivel to land back where they started.


I was reminded of one of my current favorite photographers, Lorreta Lux. Lux transforms benign portraits of children into uncanny perfectness that manages to reference both advertising photography and classic portrait painting, without being either. Like Solin, she does not aim for transparency, but has begun to articulate a vocabulary for digital manipulation that is no longer mimetic of reality. Lux and Solin's work mark the transition into a new maturity for digitally manipulated imagery. Breaking with the unimaginative mimetic of nascent technology, these artists are no longer concerned about simply mastering photoshop to emulate the natural world. They are evolving their skills to create works that reveal the language of the media in which they are working. Historically, this proves to mark a productive and aesthetically sophisticated movement. Like the Abstract Expressionists, or Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secessionist , both groups of artists departed from the previous pursuit of make their respective mediums transparent in pursuit of the ideal of creating a seamless window to reality and began to explore the idiosyncratic properties of their chosen medium. It is encouraging to see media artists step into a new confidence and awareness of the aesthetic language of their chosen tools.

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