How important for you is the way in which your pictures are taken?

 

How a picture is taken, that can mean quite different things. First there is the technical aspect, and in fact people have always asked me which photographic devices I use. For instance: How do you achieve the shine on the backs of pigs? I can only say that most of my pictures are quite dead-straight photography. That means I see a subject and make a picture of it.

 

That is not so easy to comprehend, because for example in a slaughterhouse everything happens very quickly.

 

That’s right but in spite of that what triggers me is always the immediate sensory cause. I don’t set out and think to myself, well I think today I feel romantic and I would like to have everything a little hazy. I am not a concept artist and I don’t walk around permanently with an idea in my head.

 

But the pictures you did on the „Potsdamer Platz” in Berlin do follow a quite definite idea.

 

You see the pictures in this way when you have looked at them often enough. Of course there I am playing with a construction and it’s about the construction of a new capital city for Germany at the Potsdamer Platz. But also here I started out with not so much whether I have a message but rather I asked myself if I merge that all together in this way does a good picture come out of it? First the form must be right and only then can you express something.

 

And what do the Pictures on the Potsdamer Platz express?

 

Look carefully then you’ll know. I find these pictures at least funny, also when I took them for me it was like a playful relaxation.

Why did you take photographs in Japan?

 

That had to do with a work I had done in Los Angeles before that. I suddenly realized that the supposedly secondary things in my pictures captivated me more than the main thing.

 

Can you give an example?

 

A shopping trolley with the belongings of a homeless person in the centre of a picture was suddenly less interesting than the structure of a wall in the background.

 

What did this mean for you?

 

The consideration of how much I can reduce the content of an image without it ceasing to function for me as a photographic image.

 

That means?

 

That it has tension and holds and captivates my attention. I subsequently studied painters such as Kazimir Malevich, Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman very intensively and asked myself whether it was possible to realize the painterly minimalism of their works in photography without it somehow becoming boring.

 

And then you thought of Japan?

 

Yes, I knew architecture books about Japan. I was fascinated by the rigor precision and purism expressed in the buildings presented there. I thought these qualities could help me with my project.

 

So, you weren’t interested in creating Travel images and impressions of Japan?

 

No, not at all. I was simply interested in taking good pictures.

In this endeavor, you very often blur the indexical trace of the photographic image. Your works often have a timeless and placeless effect. To what extent is that important to you?

 

This has to do with the fact that I don’t want to tell a story in my photographs. I am primarily interested in the successful form. For me, this is what makes a picture beautiful.

 

Is it even possible to avoid telling a story? Don’t the strict structures of your facades tell of the dream of measure and number? A female mouth of delicacy and vulnerability?

 

These are projections of the viewer. Legitimate projections. For me, however, the coherent image is at the center of my search. And I achieve this coherence in photography primarily through light.

The images of Frauke Eigen – images because photography is a far too technical term for what she is doing – describe silent dramas. Her choice of angles conveys the existence of shocking, scary, but also mysterious occurrences, an impression further heightened by dark prints on baryte paper. Frauke Eigen strives for additional dramatic effects by working with natural light sources, or with varying angles of incident light which light up faces, hands, objects, or landscapes.

 

The feeling of mysteriousness is conveyed in children’s eyes, which are often closed; also in those parts of a body which are outside the picture‘s frame.

Secrets have their roots in childhood. Everybody knows archetypical tales of children abandoned in the woods, where they will lay down eventually, exhausted, awaiting deliverance from this hopeless situation in the form of a dream. It is not the sun which is lighting up the scenery; instead, it is the pale moon.

 

Deserted clearings and close-up details of forests possess an equally mysterious effect, like watching Antonioni’s film Blow Up and thus inadvertently witnessing a murder. Other parallels, intentional or coincidental, can be drawn to the film Last Year at Marienbad, echoed in image details of elaborately pruned box trees. Seemingly endless roads between rows of stubble-fields are reminiscent of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Cary Grant‘s famous chase scene.

The viewer loses his (Viewers lose their) bearings because of the choice of perspective the images provide: it is almost impossible to see “the bigger picture“, meaning the whole.

 

In the Kosovo series Fundstücke Kosovo 2000 (Lost and found from Kosovo 2000), the mood of mystery has suddenly changed and is horrific. Pieces of clothing which fill out the whole frame are testimony to people who were killed. There is also the look on the face of a woman, bereft of all happiness, who must have witnessed something truly horrible. She has lost the knowledge of what protection means. She will never again experience the security which is inherent in feeling safe and secure. For her, words like ‘Heimat’ have lost their meaning for all time.

 

Being uprooted, without a home, are feelings which exist in the world, even when roots and safety also seem to exist. For this reason, her romantic ‘Heimatbilder’ entitled Obersalzberg are, in fact, images of wistfulness. They are reminiscent of protected enclaves which no longer exist or maybe never did.

 

Much like the dark surface of water, Frauke Eigen’s images depict unfathomable depths at the bottom of which dramatic scenes are occurring.

 

Let’s assume! Let’s assume I woke up unexpectedly, in a small flat, very early in the morning. What would my senses reveal to me about my whereabouts?

 

A pillow filled with buckwheat is less comfortable than the accustomed eiderdown, but provides the neck with excellent support. The futon is pleasantly hard. Slightly starched bedding conveys a sense of coolness even on a summery morning. My hands reach out searchingly and find the smooth lines of the tatami mats. At such an early hour the world outside is still remarkably quiet; lorry noise makes its way to my ears in the form of a hum. Conspicuous, the loud caws of ravens. Now and then a screech, when one of the blue-black birds whets its beak on a traffic sign. Neighbours begin puttering about with breakfast tins, only a few centimetres and a few thin walls away. Then, my eyes still closed, I notice a very specific scent. The mats used for sleeping always smell of rice straw, even after years of use. And the heartiness of the morning meal spreads its massive aroma of rice, soy, fish, tofu, soup and tea, a menu still unaccustomed even after decades. A shaft of opaque light enters the room through a window clad in frosted glass and paper. Even at this early hour, its simplicity is striking. Ochre yellow walls, a closet with blue paper sliding doors, heaps of cushions, a flat screen. Obviously Japan.

 

At this hour, Tokyo is so singularly, strangely beautiful it is hard to bear. The twenty-five million people who will be getting up and moving about over the course of the next two hours are still dozing. An old man sweeps the street in front of his house near Yoyogi Park. Cottony bread rolls are delivered to the coffee shop and very hot coffee is served. This is Frauke Eigen’s time of day.

 

Frauke Eigen calls one section of her Japan project “Mapping Tokyo”. She sleeks through the narrow lanes of the city centre and discovers house skins. In the apparently haphazard sea of little structures which account for the majority of buildings between Narita and Kobe, the façades are made primarily of tiles, mosaics, corrugated plastic and metal or similar durable materials. Japanese architecture is generally carried out in half-timber style and plywood, sometimes with frameworks of steel. For protection against the aggressive ocean air – after all, Tokyo is located on the Pacific coast, even if that fact is hardly noticeable – these meagre depreciation properties are covered in very mundane but easy-to-clean structures which are like skins.

 

Japan – even those who have never been there have images of the land of the rising sun in their heads, either the old ones: Geishas and rice wine, kimono and cherry blossom or the new ones: karaoke and skyscrapers, crowds of people in the underground, one knows about the incompatibility of the tempos, remembers how Bill Murray – in the film “Lost in Translation” by Sofia Coppola – records the silly commercial.
Japanese images, stereotypes: you imagine what you know, even though you know nothing.

 

The new photo cycle by Berlin photographer Frauke Eigen, on the other hand, shows confusingly different images of Nippon. They are far removed from any clichés. At first glance, these works, which were taken on several trips to Japan in 2006, seem completely placeless. All that can be seen are wall surfaces, structures, geometric shapes, architectural images that – devoid of people – seem to tell nothing of cities and buildings, of Japanese life. But a superficial glance is not enough – as is always the case with this artist’s work – because these photos are actually steeped in Japanese tradition and culture – and therefore in reality. Tatami, the Japanese rectangular mat, appears again and again; in a traditional Japanese house it is laid out on the floor. In modern Japan, the tatami structure can be seen on buildings and walls. Frauke Eigen shows the beauty and charming simplicity of this structure; when enlarged, an aluminium wall suddenly looks like a traditionally folded piece of paper, a wall appears transparent like a window through the play of light and shadow.

In the novel “Snow Country” by Japanese Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, the protagonist sits in a train compartment and stares spellbound at the reflection of a beautiful fellow traveller. He cannot and does not want to look her directly in the face, as that would be impolite and, above all, would disturb the mystery that surrounds the beauty.
Eigen’s pictures of Japan tell of such a reflection and of a secret, the Japanese secret and that of the photographer, who shows us beauty where apparently there is only surface.

 

And sometimes a cherry blossom also pops into the picture. This is a special kind of happiness for the viewer.

 

 

It requires a fair amount of patience in order to find the world’s best paper shop in Tokyo’s Bunkyo quarter. Paper Nao was the name Naoki Sakamoto gave his enterprise, which enjoys an exceptional reputation in international artists’ and restorers’ circles, three decades ago. On just a few square metres on the first floor of a small commercial building the stunning products of Japanese manufacturers are assembled, suitable for watercolours and ink painting, and not least for calligraphy. Of course Sakamoto also sells the famous brushes, from the broadest to precision products suitable for the very finest miniatures.

 

However, Sakamoto also incorporates manmade artefacts into his papers. He regularly travels to Nepal and scrapes the surfaces off the typical, colourful clay houses in order to mix the scrapings into his paper slurry. This produces lively colour structures with their own unique smell: it is exactly the smell that is created when the first raindrops fall on the ceramic shingles of an Asian roof. Sakamoto makes paper for all of the senses, paper that makes a statement and is sufficient unto itself. He does all this with his characteristic nintai, his philosophical patience.

 

In addition Sakamoto-sensei designs his own artist’s papers, which put every connoisseur of Japanese washi culture into a state of rapture. The master blends natural growth with hand-scooping. He is always searching for special leaves in the expansive Japanese forests and for fragrant algae on the beaches, which he then combines with the centimetre-thick pulp. The dried works face us like reliefs; the relics of nature can be vaguely discerned rather than seen, in fact it is easier to smell them.

 

However, Sakamoto also incorporates manmade artefacts into his papers. He regularly travels to Nepal and scrapes the surfaces off the typical, colourful clay houses in order to mix the scrapings into his paper slurry. This produces lively colour structures with their own unique smell: it is exactly the smell that is created when the first raindrops fall on the ceramic shingles of an Asian roof. Sakamoto makes paper for all of the senses, paper that makes a statement and is sufficient unto itself. He does all this with his characteristic nintai, his philosophical patience.

Frauke Eigen photographed evidence of the Balkan genocide

 

A watch whose hands stopped precisely at 5.32 and 17 seconds p.m. Water has entered into its casing, the glass was shattered. Another image: The threadbare remains of man’s underwear, blooden crusted cloth. A third: a short-sleeved man’s shirt, one side of the collar is torn of, the right shoulder and a large part of the back are missing.

These are terrifying testimonies. Because these clothes which the Berlin-based photographer Frauke Eigen has captured, come from a mass-grave in Kosovo. When it was opened and exhumed, she was allowed to watch. Not much is known about the person who once wore these pieces of clothing. They were discovered below a meadow, recalls Frauke Eigen and tells this story in her trademark hushed voice: “The bodily remains were scattered throughout a grassy hill. Excavators would remove layer and layer of soil while five people in protective white suits were standing nearby shouting every time they discovered an arm or a leg. Towards the edge of the meadow, people from the village were sitting who knew perfectly well that someone like their father lay there.“ She took photographs of such remnants which were then cataloged as evidence for the war tribunal in The Hague. Photographs that were also taken all over the Balkan by the investigators but hers are maybe a bit more beautiful. As of today, they are being exhibited at the gallery Camera Work – and meant to be sold.

 

A fact that makes the 32-year-old artist slightly uncomfortable, although she is the first photographer without an international reputation to enjoy the privilege of being exhibited in a space normally reserved for the likes of Leni Riefenstahl oder Helmut Newton. Is it admissable to turn into art the remnants of victims of genocide? A question that Frauke Eigen keeps asking herself as well. She is quite aware of treading on thin ice and doing a balancing act between sensationalism and distance. Which is why this series entitled Fundstücke Kosovo 2000 (Lost and found from Kosovo 2000) is not actually adorning the walls of the gallery like other works would but is presented in a slipcase that the viewer has to leaf through as though it was a book. “I am not out to make money with this“, she says, guardedly. Whatever money will be made from it is meant go to a relief organisation in Kosovo.
Still, an uneasy feeling lingers and this for the simple fact that she was able to take these photos because nobody from the German contingent much cared whether she was watching the exhumation.

When American investigators took over, she was thrown out on the spot, regardless of her official authorization from The Hague. Her presence at this site of horrors was simply not requested. Naturally, she says. Naturally, because if you look at it superficially, nothing distinguishes me from a photo-journalist. It is very difficult to explain that part of my motivation is to create pictures which I have seen a thousand times.

 

We find it difficult to imagine an art completely without beauty, even when we see it. Art, and all things and the dead, such as they are. As difficult as the notion of a person, in whose heart every spark of goodness has been extinguished.

As if it violates a principle of logic, a natural law, an ethical postulate. No beauty? End? Is this emptiness thinkable? Should one rage against it? Or at least archive it? Show it? Doesn’t one glowing coal still stir in the ashes on the ground? “Thorough searching, feeling, grasping, it comes once more to light” “not right!” The language defends itself by offering seductive conjunctions, reflective howevers and despites. Looking at has difficulties here. As does looking away. An old man believes that fear and horror purify the people – one even older perhaps no longer. And this one esteemed the artists less and took their pictures all the more seriously. He described ideal reality in this way: The public, not in a bad mood, a well filled room, head on straight, everything dark, a concentrated gaze, eyes fixed firmly on the event, black white light from behind, no right or left, up or down, so firm. So concentrated, so abandoned, that one doesn’t even notice any more. Film, as though reality. Being shown is a film from the brothers Grimm. In it, a young girl promises not to speak, not a single word, until she has finished sewing six shirts for her enchanted brothers, and when she is already tied to the stake because the king will wait no longer and the first bundle of wood has already been lit, there finally comes a rushing from the heavens and six swans fly down and put down the fire with their wings, and the young girl throws the shirts over them and has her brothers again unscathed. As though unscathed.

 

 

It can happen that the first topic you might be talking about with Frauke Eigen are aeroplanes. Transall aircrafts taking off, rumbling clumsily from a airfield somewhere in Bosnia. Or a stand-by Boeing of the German Bundeswehr which transported her alongside a permanent secretary from the foreign office to the Balkan. Or a windowless UN plane in which she last travelled to Afghanistan.

Apparently, it had been making its way to Kabul pretty much like a bird of prey swooping down directly above the city. When travelling, Frauke Eigen has to take what she can get. Most regular airlines simply do not operate services to the places she is interested in. After all, these are crisis areas.

Fighting may have often ceased but still, these regions are a long way off from normalcy. They are societies in a transitional state where violence has left behind ugly wounds and fields of rubble. And, alas, the peaceful melancholy brought about by sheer exhaustion.

Why Frauke Eigen, a 33-year-old slender woman, keeps visiting war-torn areas, is an enigma even to herself. These journeys touch a side in her she talks about only reluctantly. In fact, she is no great talker to begin with. If she talks at all, this Berlin-based photographer does it with such a low voice that it is difficult to make out what she is saying. It is a peculiar, idiosyncratic contrast to the deeply-black large-format pictures she takes in the shadows of terror and destruction: A young mother’s worried glance at her sick child which is being examined by a doctor; the head of a sleeping child leaning on another woman’s shoulder; a boy at a river bank smiling for the camera while he is stepping out of the water, freezing. War does not occur in these photos and yet, they possess a somber power which also exists in the pores, headscarves, and clothing of these people as if it is black, cooled-off, crusted lava.

When the Afghan National Gallery will reopen shortly in renovated splendor, it is these images that will be adorning its freshly-plastered walls for the first time. When the Taliban moved into the center of the city back in 1996, the building was in a miserable state.. With water-colors, an Afghan doctor and amateur painter had quickly painted over many artefacts in the collection so to protect them from destruction, since the religious zealots destroyed every image in all of Afghanistan which depicted people or animals: it was topic matter forbidden by the Koran. After the ousting of the Taliban, the building, once an upper-class residential building, was a sorry sight and “badly wrecked“, says Renate Elsässer from the Goethe Institute. “The Taliban tore open the walls to get to the copper wire from the electric wiring.“

Renate Elsässer first noticed Frauke Eigen while she was spending several weeks last summer recording the efforts of the Technische Hilfswerk (a state-owned relief organisation dealing with technical and organisational aspects) in setting up rebuilding projects and, whenever time allowed, took urgent, vivid portraits, and landscape photographs. She wants to give a cycle of 27 works to the National Gallery – a gift which could just become the basis for a collection befitting a museum of this kind.

 

The picture’s structure traces the cool symmetries of architectural modernity and the dry objectivity of its preferred material: grid lines made of concrete slabs guide the gaze to the picture’s centre at which the strictly rectangular empty space of a dry swimming pool takes up the entire width of the image. At its end, somewhat above the centre of the painting, and again in the middle, the reduced geometrical, balanced form of a diving tower rises up which is flanked on the left and right by two smaller towers that completely match. The strictness and straightness of these elements is underscored by the soft curves on the mountain peaks behind disappearing in sfumato and the downright amorphous-seeming perforations of the concrete skin of the pool. A sharp, small shadow is drawn on the left-hand side in hard contrast in the depths of the pool. Above the right-hand edge of the pool, small blocks are visible like an echo of the pool’s geometry and on closer inspection turn out to be a group of houses.

 

This scenery seems to have been arranged for the shot, but Frauke Eigen only photographs what she finds. Harmonious compositions, rhythmic contrasts and fine shades of grey characterize her clear black-and-white photographs. In a formal sense the works are sobre, even and concentrated. The choice of detail mostly excludes those connections which could serve a temporal and spatial orientation. Through this focusing, Frauke Eigen’s portraits, which are of enormous intensity, along with the floral arrangements, sculptural architectures, surfaces of the sea and constellations of foliage, generate a system of minimalist structural analyses. The presentation of the photos in matt baryta prints bonded with aluminium and the uniformly almost square formats give the impression of seriality.

 

Frauke Eigen’s photographic tableaux immediately captivate through a specific intensity which is hard to approach conceptually. At first viewers stand vis-à-vis the pictures as spectators, since they do not know their conditions of production and the reality lying behind them. But already when their gaze glides over the depicted objects and their surfaces, the passive spectators become active viewers who dip into the artist’s world of images through their powers of perception. From receptors of empirical stimuli, from onlookers and gawkers, they turn into participants. On the one hand, they become scientists investigating the causes. This is the state of viewers guided by reason who are situated quietly and untouched, at a distance vis-à-vis the performance and delude themselves into believing that they are in control of the situation. On the other, they are drawn into the magical power of the portrayal and partake of the living energy of what is offered which, because of its character as photographic documentation, is already past. The captured vitality of what is shown combines in its performance, in the intelligence of the staging and in the energy it transfers, with the viewers’ vitality. As both distanced observers and sensuous feasters, the viewers interact with what is shown, but with differing degrees of empathy. Theatre has made these different viewers’ states into the starting-point for two paradigmatic stances: Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theatre”[1] and Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty”.[2] Frauke Eigen’s artistic procedure with regard to production and reception, however, can be assigned neither to the pole of distanced, reflective viewing nor to that of the gaze of surrealist desire.