Our Image of Time Is a Fragment. On the Presence of Transience in Joachim Brohm’s Photography

This is not merely the response of an artist who knows that the status of the documentary image is riddled with fault lines and that there is a need for new forms of photographic processing capable of describing social reality, or who keenly senses that a historically conceptual or traditional documentary style has outlived its usefulness as an artistic method, at least for the moment. No, this freer approach is above all a concession by the artist to his own desire to simply trust the gaze of his own trained eye and to follow it with openness and curiosity. This project thus raises new questions about the medium, asking what the photographic image is or can be, what it stands for, and what it can (still)—more or less—show. These are questions that involve the viewer more strongly than before. Viewers are now challenged to clarify where the picture actually begins beyond its factual limitation by four sides, or where exactly the motif is situated, whether it tells us something or whether it even still wants to. The questions asked of the photographic image have shifted, and not only the images but also their organization in the book raise these questions more insistently than in past projects by the artist. Fresh contextualizations are therefore constantly established. This provisional or transient state means that not only the places and buildings depicted can be seen through new eyes, but the images can also assert themselves as deliberately chosen photographic and artistic excerpts and can begin to exist, as it were, “for themselves,” detached from the Miesian universe. (…)
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