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| THEATRE OF THE OVERLOOKED About the work of German Photo Artist Erasmus Schröter When the the Leipzig (East Germany) based Photo Artist Erasmus Schröter and his team uses light to dramatically stage objects, there is a smell of petrol in the air. Powerful generators provide electricity for entire rows of colored spotlights, wich throw brilliant, heavily colored light on strange objects located on the site chosen for the photographic project. In his images, Schröter celebrates things existing on the periphery, in darkness – left to disappear. Schröter has spent several years employing this approach to photograph the ruins of bunkers on the North Sea and Atlantic coasts of Europe. These gray, slowly decaying, bizarre blocks of concrete are abruptly torn from their slumber of Schröter`s illumination. Bathed in almost obscenely garish colors, wich could well have been borrowed from the world of advertising, these objects develop a surprising ambivalence between beauty and menace. It is especially the images of the seawashed concrete skeletons in the evening light wich provocatively counteract the mood of the romantic german paintings of a Caspar David Friedrich or Arnold Böcklin. The martial concrete of the bunkers contrasts sharply with the series of desolate , abandoned summer houses photographed by Schröter. Here one sees the extremely fragile, ramshackle, wooden remnants of the enjoyment of a garrden that is now long since past private architecture, possibly constructed by the same generation of men who had to build the bunkers. Abandoned to decay and vandalism, they number among the things that are usually overlooked, no longer perceived, and certainly not considered worthy of a photograph. Caught in Schröter`s theatre of light,however,they take on a mysterious dignity and significance. Erasmus Schröter belongs to those photo artists who employ the tools of conventional chemical photography - devoid of manipulations on computers or in the laboratory – to explore the boundaries of their medium. The raw material used to create magic of his images is the same raw material on wich photography has been founded since its inception – light. Tobias Wieland |