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The exhibition ‘staubfrei – analoge Fotografie’ unites five analogue photography positions from the Ludwigshafen-Mannheim-Heidelberg region who each pursue very different approaches and techniques – from cameraless photography through historical methods to colour photography. It is also about querying visual habits and handed-down prejudices when the subject is ‘photography’. With this, ‘staubfrei’ features in the series of exhibitions at PORT25 which is devoted to the different genres and the dissolution of their boundaries in contemporary art.

Steffen Diemer has dedicated himself to wet-plate collodion photography, in which every shot is a unique piece: the glass plate bearing the motif is the negative, which only first becomes visible as a positive through a dark background. With Diemer, everyday things – like flowers or chocolate whips – appear oddly familiar and at the same time nostalgically other-worldly.

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‘timeless’ is the name of a series by Inessa Siebert, in which the motifs shine out of the deepest darkness like highlights. In ‘still leben’ Siebert alludes to the Baroque theme of Vanitas; simultaneously, she exhibits moments frozen, in a sense, in the course of time. Her photograms on old baryte papers sweep away viewers into inscrutably poetic image spaces. 

From black-and-white poetry to garishly coloured sham, Daniel Stier catapults us into the consumer world of cheap mass products. The works in the series ‘any two for five’ represent our economic system focused on maximising profits. Stier applies the aesthetic of advertising photography with subversive humour in his artistic work and thus carries the at once fictitious and manifest boundary between commercial and artistic photography to absurdity.

‘dust to dust’ is an installation in which Frank Göldner queries the documentary purpose of photography in a manner which is equally autobiographically motivated and universally readable. He sanded off the shots from sixteen years – one for each year – and collected the paper dust. The question is posed of what remains and how archivable pictorialised memories actually are. 

Conversely, Markus Kaesler asks to what extent unerasable traces manifest themselves where, in course the of time, events become historical facts of past eras. Kaesler pursues the basics of photography by making light, motion, time and space visible.

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