Frauke Eigen in conversation with Ralf Müller

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.

Humor is otherwise not exactly the principal theme of your pictures.

Well, humour also isn’t the principal theme of the world is it? I haven’t invented the things I photographed that is just how it is. As a photographer it’s my task first of all to record these pictures.

How is it then that even slaughtered pigs of all things look so beautiful?

I don’t know. I’ve often been asked whether I’ve used a special kind of film or some other kind of trick. It involves quite direct photography without messing around, the beauty in the pictures is not something smuggled in later but already there before me.

Is this true of the pictures from Lichtenhagen?

These pictures show the walls in a home for asylum-seekers after an arson attack by right wing extremists: If these subjects are actually beautiful then at the same time they are also tragic.

You often allude to the objective in your work. That sounds as if you have your models in the sphere of Bernd and Hilla Becher, there it is also about objectivity.

That’s not at all misguided. First of all the Bechers have done an enormous amount for photography in Germany. They have made it possible that a photograph can hang in a museum just like a painting. And paradoxically they’ve achieved that because they have not tried to paint a picture with a camera. Then there were quickly the so-called „Becher-schools” and then came the imitators. I do feel an affinity to that kind of work although my work is so completely different.

I feel however, that your pictures are extremely subjective which has nothing to do with the objectivity of the Bechers.

The Becher pictures are also subjective. If they photograph various water towers from the same vantage point then that is certainly very subjective. And if I photograph women in Bosnia then I on the other hand try to be as objective as possible.

But your pictures are emotional and that is the exact opposite of the Becher school.

Emotineness and passion have always interested me, these are human facts. But if it  was only about passion for me then I wouldn’ have to take the pictures, it would be enough for me to lie down and beat the ground with my fists.

Your pictures are exclusively black and white. Does that mean that you are a traditional photographer?

This question does not arise for me.  Black and white is simply the one method of photography which allows me to get the best possible grasp of certain difficulties. On the other hand there are always points where the restriction of black and white becomes a problem. When I really like the apron of a woman in Bosnia, then the colours are lost. I have to concentrate then on the depiction and this spurs on my ambition again to try in black and white.

You talk about difficulties, can you explain that in a bit more detail?

I mean my work process. On the one side there is the photographing on the spot and then the work in the darkroom. I do everything myself, right from the develpoing up to large prints. Also they are done by hand and that’s only possible with black and white paper.

Is the work done by hand an important aspect for you with your pictures?

Yes, very important, but not in the sense that I have a romantic picture of good old fashioed photography. But I simply love the stench of the darkroom, the dirt of the chemicals and the headaches from the vapours. A farmer who loves the smell of the dung heap which he sees every morning doesn’t have to be romantic.

Apart from the beauty something which I want vaguely to call darkness runs through your pictures. This darkness appears both in Fireworks- that is in more abstract works- but also ihn the pictures from Bosnia.

For me these different sets of pictures does not stand in contradiction. And perhaps beauty and what you call darkness belong together. And then Fireworks and the pictures from Bosnia are not so different any more. I don’t take an abstract here and documentary pictures there, everything comes from the same source.

What is that source?

Call it art if you want to.