Olaf Unverzart is looking for a moment of epiphany, when time could run either backwards or forward and the picture is animated by a subliminal tension. The deceleration of time and space inherent to the photographs prompts us as spectators to observe with equal slowness, to the point of pausing in our own motion, and thereby to expand our own perception. The photographs capture instants that are not defined by a philosophy of the right moment; they just last, render perceptible the time and space continuum, and, reminiscent of the video and photographic work of David Claerbout, direct our view at hardly perceivable changes and traces of the visible world.

Olaf Unverzart takes his pictures with an awareness for the rhetoric and the workings of photography. His visual idiom is not aiming at superficial effects but at sustained impact. On his search for the punctum in photography, he finds traces in landscapes, architecture and the physiognomy of people, instances where a kind f presence of what is absent can be experienced. 

Pohlmann, Ulrich. "A Photograph Is a Chameleon." Ed. Institut für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg. Olaf Unverzart. Leichtes Gepäck. Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2009. 

Go back