Exhibition: "Ottmar Hörl – Fotokonzepte" [Ottmar Hörl – Foto Concepts] at Galerie Bode in Nuremberg, 1 to 22 May 2021

On the occasion of this year's photo festival, the Nuremberg-based Galerie Bode opened its virtual exhibition presenting photo concepts created by Ottmar Hörl.

In these works, Ottmar Hörl succeeds "by changing the current method of photography to make a completely different and at first unfamiliar perspective of our environment accessible to the viewer.

According to Ottmar Hörl, people are trapped in a bubble, a bubble of habits and familiar things. Since we don't like to leave this safety zone, our gaze always wanders to similar scenes or motifs, and this is no different with photography. In order to develop a completely new type of photography, it is essential to change the underlying principle first: the method of photography.

Hörl returns control to the machine having it take pictures without constraint, images that a human being would never be able to produce. The apparatus offers possibilities that are not available to humans. It can be thrown from high above and rotated hundreds of times, thus creating images that completely evade familiar viewing habits. Even if these processes seem random at first, they work according to a specific pattern such as gravity or centrifugal force. These photographs are taken at a decisive moment, almost as if a person were to press the shutter-release button. The only difference is that the machine takes the decision under the prevailing physical conditions.

From 1982, the conceptual artist produced various ideas for the new camera perspective. For the photo series "Requiem for Vincent", the artist attached a camera to a wheel hub of a bicycle and cycled through a field of flowers. The resulting images exude an aesthetic that initially seems unfamiliar, as the way of looking at things is literally twisted. But the aesthetic that then reveals itself is that of the camera and the world as such."

Text: Anna Bode, Galerie & Edition Bode GmbH

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