Maria Vedder’s video Blues for an Unknown Photographer (original title: Blues für einen unbekannten Fotografen, 1987) and Róbert Olawuyi’s media art installation flickr.comment (2009) place the photo camera within the image. While Vedder playfully mounts her camera in front of dark drapes in a typical studio environment, Olawuyi makes a Polaroid camera talk (and rant) about photography. The levity of the music heard in Vedder’s video seems to contradict the work title. Yet, here too, the question that hangs in the air is from which point on glamorous photographic superficiality will result in melancholia. Róbert Olawuyi turns to the online photo platform Flickr to sustain an entire flood of projected images. The accompanying critical comments about photography as a type of addiction are from a text by Thomas Bernhard and are read by the artist Jürgen Klauke.
Thomas Kutschker uses a few hundred photographs of the Berlin Wall made by the Border Troops of the German Democratic Republic for documentation purposes. The montage of the succession of these black and white photos creates a minimalist filmic sequence accompanied only by a formal voice which reads out the brief archival notes about the geographical origins of the photographs and their register numbers
