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PHOTOGRAPHY, WRITING AND REALITY

The collages of Stefan Jammer rely on multidimensional dialectics to explore opposites. They contain contrasting motives joined into a pictural unit with opposing texts and imagines. The upper and lower part of the collages provide partially positive, partially dark, brutal, absurd sides of humanity. The words reflect book titles and they are part of the collage instead of headings. They represent a commentary, or an interpretation, of the intersection between images and philosophical writings. Each collage evokes a number of possible visual meanings interpreting each other. The contrast seems again infected with the words, and then likewise with the written works whose titles they represent.

Often, images and texts claim to reflect facts and situations. However, "reality" is a difficult and often controversial term. We are guided by organic and social activities while experiencing resistance, suffering and failure pointing at an independent reality on which we and the success of our actions and our life in general depend. Image and writing support orientation but they are different ways of responding to reality, of capturing traces of experienced reality, of placing markers or even of evoking and reinforcing attitudes.

Conventional photography claims reality as a physical imprint of an actual instantaneous point in space. Photography resembles our visual perceptual image and is therefore closer to our sensorimotor activity than writing. Written characters are symbols. The letters that make up the words are usually not similar to auditory or visual stimuli, as are the written words. Accordingly, writing is close to the interpretive, deciphering, inferential activities of our attention. In other words not only audiovisual phenomena are conveyed, but entire patterns of interpretation, which are more or less explicit in the text. The writings of Cioran and Baudrillard - whose work titles the artist quotes in his collages - engage with the literary rather than the scientific branch of though. They question the whole value of existence. In other words, what culture and humanity are. Thinkers like Cioran enables us to read experiences as models for one's own wandering of thoughts, free interpretation, values, understanding. In the collages, the work shrinks down to the title while the flood of images outweighs the written works, which in the distant background, represent a potential key of understanding.

Friedrich Hausen