From the artist statement: “The series “Selfportraits” was created using two large mirrors and public photo boths found in and around Berlin.”

From the artist statement: “This project involves the game of baseball, the role of the pitcher, the batter, and the baseball in flight. I’m particularly interested in the trajectory and visual cues that the batter uses to determine where the ball will end up and how we perceive this process. For example, the batter relies on cues such as the blurring pattern the moving ball makes, the posture of the pitchers, the point at which the pitcher releases the ball and expectations derived from previous pitches. In this series I am actively investigating how this can relate to broader understandings of human sight and perception.”

From the artist statement: “One hour. Near an airport. Mechanical ballet.”

From the artist statement: “On a clear day, look to the sky, face the sun and close your eyes. Your eyelid slides over the pupil, environment disappears, but does sight? Unfocused light pours in through a fleshy membrane, creating a gradient blood orange color. Viewing without seeing, looking at the sun through ourselves: an afterimage. I recorded a recreation of this effect, not with an eyelid, but with white latex paint poured onto glass, lit to glow like light through thin flesh. Once the paint settled into a circle, I saw I hadn’t just recreated the color, I’d poured out a small model of the sun. There’s circularity to engaging the cosmos photographically. The camera owes part of its existence to lens technology established centuries before, used to better view space. I made the picture with a view camera using large sheet film that records a tremendous amount of information. It’s an inconvenient, slow process that allows me to meet the pace of the desired encounter.”

Such a smart image, abstract at first glance and so simple once you know what you are looking at – an old vinyl record half way pulled out of an album sleeve! To me, the image is evocative of different things: personal teenage memories, the mutual tradition of analog reproduction of music and photography and the large non-textual share in communication of both visual and audible arts.
When I was a young boy, my father would make me listen to a lot of music – played on vinyl records spinning on a turntable at 33 1/2 rpm. Classical music mostly, but also Neue Musik, Schönberg, Rihm. Whenever I would ask why he thought a specific piece of music was interesting or why he liked it, he would always reply: “It is hard to put in words. It is just like looking at a painting! You simply have to look or listen! Most of what is being said here can not be put into words. If all could be put in words, there would be no need for music or paintings, literature would be enough!” Now, maybe he just didn’t want to be bothered or was too lazy to explain, but to me it explained the close relation between the emotional, intuitive sensation of looking at pieces of art and listening to pieces of music. And because words are mostly not enough, this will actually be my only statement throughout my curation of the “Guest Room” this month. In individual cases, if provided by the photographer, I will maybe quote from the artist statement. But I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has submitted work. I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of images. I worked through over 4500 pictures and will be able to publish roughly 40 or 50 here. Needless to say that there were many more that would have been worth showing!