Image generation – a specific type of nowhere

The blue pot is a famous appearance in the karst landscape near Blaubeuren on the eastern edge of the Swabian Alb. It is the source of the blue, a river that does not owe its name to the color of the water, but the pre -Germanic name “Blava” and flows into the Danube in Ulm.

The blue pot is known for the more or less intensive, but always strikingly blue color of its water, which is more or less intensive, which arises from a physical effect of the light scattering on the limestone particles, which are dispersed in the water. “Blautopf, Germany, 2022” is the name of a photography by Axel Hütte, which is currently shown in the exhibition “Silence Weit” in Remagen, in the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck. The photo kept in pale blue is so composed that a clear center of image and thus a weighting of the shown is suspended. It cannot be said with certainty whether the ferns to be seen in the water. And as with almost all of the photos shown by hut in the exhibition, it is not understandable where the photographer or the camera stood. We cannot make sure of a safe bank.

About his approach, which he calls “picture generation”, says Hütte: “I stand still, be amazed and try to translate this astonishment.” The “Blaubeuren” titled photographs in which the natural colors have been converted into their visual opposite are abstract, almost psychedelic compositions. In contrast, Hüttes evoked a feeling of emptiness in Antarctic. “Through the different motifs,” said Julian Heynen in the catalog for the exhibition, “the photographs are increasingly focusing in a specific way of nowhere.”

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Axel Hütte is to be attributed to the Düsseldorf photo school, also known as the designation of the Becher School. It was established in the late 1970s as a school of artistic photography by Bernd and Hilla Becher. Its centers were the Düsseldorf art academy, where Bernd Becher held a professorship for photography from 1976 to 1996, as well as the Becher studio in Düsseldorf-Kaiserswerth.

In the ARP Museum, 36 works by Axel Hütte can be seen, mostly with a record camera generated shots of mountain range, waters, glaciers, but also bridges and flowers. The pictures are deserted and have no narrative structures. Hütte’s work, guided by a strictly compositional vision, are not recordings produced in the quick process, but the result of detailed research and often long trips to certain places. According to Hütte, he let his gaze wander at least forty times on the Swiss fur capass. We do not know how often he looks at one of the three peaks of the Austrian mountain of Totenkopf. Hütte presents us with the rock massif towering from thin fog swaths as an auratic work. In his essay “Small History of Photography”, Walter Benjamin Aura “calls a strange web from space and time”, for example, if you follow a mountain range on the horizon in one summer after, which throws your shadow on the viewer until the moment or the hour has part in its appearance – that is, breathing the aura of these mountains.

The strictly geometric bridge photographs of Hüttes, such as »St. Marcel, Bridge, France, 1997 “or” ISE, Bridge, Japan, 2012/2017 “, as well as” Blautopf “, puzzle about the artist’s location (and thus the eye or the camera). Picture parallel excerpts from Kastenbrücken dominate the motif with its grid shape. The vegetation in the background is parceled out and can hardly be described as a landscape section. Hütte’s bridge images are most likely to refer to the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose project was a comprehensive inventory of anonymous purpose buildings from the period of industrialization, which on their black and white photographs of structures of steel structures were particularly plastic.

“Flowers” is the title of the series of recordings, in which hut shows the flowers from a deeply black surroundings, from the middle of nowhere. These flowers have nothing in common with those of the magnificent bouquets of historical paintings. What we see are the shadows of cut flowers, flowers that have become light due to color reversal, flowing from nature to the artist’s studio, from the landscape to still life, to spirits themselves. The cold -glowing flower stems have their effect, especially when they tower on paper deductions. The flowers can be seen as symbols of vanitas.

Axel Hütte: “Silent Wide”, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, until June 15th. The catalog of the same name was published by the Walter and Franz König bookstore in Cologne.