Cabinet exhibition N°2
Volkmar Herre
Artist and exhibition period
Exhibition/Artist
GRENZENLOSE Zeit
Volkmar Herre
Pinhole camera photos – boundless, poetic and full of aesthetics
From September 11th – October 31st2021
About the exhibition GRENZENLOSE ZEIT
The process of photography, which has been practiced publicly since 1839, was initially associated with very long exposure times. Photographs from the early period impress precisely for this reason in their rapture and silence. But relatively quickly, capturing a moment became possible – snapshots soon dominated photography. Added to this was the sharpness of the image. With high-performance lenses, almost every wish of the photographer is fulfilled today; the precision now far exceeds the perceptive capacity of the human eye.
Today, lensless photography with pinhole cameras based on the principle of the camera obscura pursues other goals, whether as a reaction to high-tech cameras that can do “everything” or simply for fun or because it is artistically interesting to create aesthetically high-quality images with an original method. My turning to pinhole photography in 1997 was, since I had previously worked with state-of-the-art cameras, a watershed moment.
Especially in nature and landscape photography, I achieved different, almost picturesque images with this medium in a new way of dealing with light and time. Experiences with exposures of minutes, sometimes hours, led to thoughts of letting the light work for much longer. The process now spans a range from image projection in a dark room to months of exposure of a light-sensitive paper to digital fixing of the result and shaping of the image on the computer.
The longer the exposure, the more conspicuous is the alienation of reality in the result. Without chemical processes in the laboratory, something new gradually emerges as if from nothing in a symbiosis with the image of the sun, to whose light intensity the emulsion reacts instantaneously. There are hardly any comparisons for such images of “utopian reality”. Let yourself be captivated and enchanted by the spiritual world.
Biography Volkmar Herre
1943 Born in Freiberg/Saxony, lives in Stralsund
1961-1968 Training as a commercial typesetter
1963- 1968 Photography studies at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig
1997 Turning to the camera obscura – lensless photography
Since 2014, “Herrographies” have been created in a completely new way of dealing with light and time.