A collection of evidence

Could you perhaps explain this using the example of your exhibition Image Capital, which was shown at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Fondazione MAST in Bologna? This traveling exhibition, which was conceived and presented differently at each location, dealt with photography as a storage and information technology.

That reminds me of Joseph Kosuth and his work One and Three Chairs. The piece consists of a chair, a photograph of a chair, and a dictionary definition of the word “chair.” The work includes the premise that it’s basically irrelevant who took the photo of the chair.

So your photography becomes a kind of puzzle piece or module within a larger exhibition context, where it's only peripherally about the fact that your photographs might also be for sale.

The image becomes a kind of evidence or contextual image?

The presentation had something sacred about it.

And what kind of insight does that generate?

Insight always comes when images undergo a kind of media transfer. My motifs can almost always be quickly linked to basic existential issues that concern us all—especially because the motifs often only become visible through my photographs. In a way, they’re brought from invisibility into visibility. This has to do with the fact that, in recent years, I’ve systematically photographed subjects that reflect the state of the world—from architectural structures that alter river courses, to greenhouses where monocultures are cultivated, to the office of the President of the Italian Republic. When the images are co-curated and connected to elements from the exhibition site, a personal and site-specific agenda is added to the context. An exhibition then reconnects to a space and to a local audience.

How can we imagine this kind of site-specific reconnection in the example of the Centre Pompidou?

When the exhibition finally came to Paris, we wanted to engage directly with the city. Within walking distance of the Centre Pompidou was the huge construction site of Notre-Dame. The architects responsible for the reconstruction faced the problem that they lacked reliable 3D renderings or building plans. During my research, I read in an article that a level of the video game Assassin’s Creed takes place inside Notre-Dame. The game developer Ubisoft had rendered Notre-Dame using various data and made it available for the reconstruction. However, this data proved unusable for the architects. My research then led me to the team of Livio De Luca, a researcher who had developed a program to photogrammetrically scan, identify, and classify every fragment that had fallen to the ground during the fire. In the end, however, it was the data of a deceased university professor—who had photogrammetrically documented Notre-Dame with his students as part of a research project—that proved decisive. De Luca’s team found the data on hard drives in the professor’s estate. Thanks to this precise mapping, each piece of debris could be clearly identified. In all these different reconstruction efforts at Notre-Dame, photography played a central role. Photography became a time machine. And by including this method of photography in the Paris exhibition, Estelle and I created a strong local connection. That’s what I mean by “docking”—when I speak of the tension between photography and the physical space of an exhibition.

Photogrammetry is set to transform our understanding of photography because the data for three-dimensional reconstruction is inherent within the two-dimensional image.

Strictly speaking, photogrammetry is nothing new in photography. Even in the 19th century, people used it—photographing architecture or landscapes from many different angles in order to later create a three-dimensional representation. Photogrammetry essentially emerged together with photography. Today, it forms the basis of video games like Grand Theft Auto, where we move freely through three-dimensional worlds and constantly shift our perspective. Our screen has a flat surface, but we navigate in a three-dimensional space.

So, in what way does photogrammetry correspond to natural human vision?

As humans, we have two eyes. By combining two similar but slightly different images—originating only a few centimeters apart—our brain can calculate a three-dimensional perception of the space we’re in. And that’s essentially how photogrammetry works. Of course, it’s also used for military purposes—such as calculating and optimizing the trajectories of weapons, where, for instance, a flying bomb scans its surroundings in real time photogrammetrically.

Let’s return to the role of photography in your work.

In my exhibitions, photography is always the foundation and starting point—a kind of bait to open discourse and integrate photography into different exhibition strategies. At the same time, I also work in a very classical way, because I mostly shoot in medium format, which is still a demanding practice. I primarily see myself as a photographer, even if the situation has become much more complex and opaque than it was, say, 15 or 20 years ago.

You speak and argue like a forensic investigator.

That might be true, but I do hope that I’m seen as a poetic forensic observer of nuance. I’m interested in the poetic clues within the medium I use. I increasingly ask myself how images are even used in our society today. My first film, Alpi (2011), dealt with how we can still perceive a landscape like the Alps—a landscape that has been depicted for centuries in art, tourism, and advertising. The film doesn’t show the landscape itself, but rather how it is represented. It takes on a similar role to a book or an exhibition. Such a film—or a book—is more like a collection of evidence than a judgment.

One of your most famous and well-known image series is about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang, China. You undertook a strenuous and complex journey to China to take those photos, having yourself accredited as a photographer by a Milan-based construction company in order to gain access to the site. The resulting images are monumental—almost overwhelming photography, given the sheer scale of the subject. Would you consider this poetic-forensic work?

Even in that project, I wasn’t only interested in the classic monumental image. Already back then, I was concerned with the people who were not in the frame and with the massive—yet invisible—infrastructure required for the dam’s construction. A city of one million people had to be relocated, and workers were brought in from distant regions across China. They had to work under conditions they had no power to negotiate. Beyond the impressive motif, I was interested in these infrastructures and in the invisible social and psychological consequences of the forced resettlement of large parts of the local population. What forms around the dam? What new economic and societal structures arise when such a massive project is carried out?

And that’s exactly what you do: you travel the world to document, in thousands of elliptical repetitions, different facets of humankind’s will to conquer nature. You mentioned your film Alpi, but also your books, your archive, and the exhibitions you no longer hang alone in your galleries as an artist—but always collaboratively, with co-curators from very different disciplines.

Yes, perhaps it took a certain amount of time and a certain critical mass of images—a kind of productive chaos—for me to evolve in this way. But at the same time, it was always important for me to show in my images that places like the Three Gorges Dam aren’t simply exotic locations on the other side of the world. On the contrary—they are deeply connected to us and globally networked. It wasn’t just Italian companies from Milan involved with finance and engineering services. Siemens Germany supplied enormous pumps for the dam. Many international consortia participated in the construction. These highly complex, technical structures, which might initially appear exotic and isolated in the landscape, reveal upon closer inspection that they are, in fact, bridges of global interconnection—a hallmark of our 21st century. This way of working began about twelve years ago, when the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin—then under the direction of Bernd Scherer—invited me to contribute my images to an exhibition on the Anthropocene. That was really the starting point where the process of reading and assembling images became more important to me than merely showing photographs in an exhibition.

So the Anthropocene exhibition at HKW marked a beginning?

Yes, it was in that moment that I realized my images contain potential tensions that want to be brought to the surface. I was actually surprised myself that it was precisely the theatrical means of staging that were able to bring out these latent tensions in the photographs.

One important exhibition that built on Anthropocene was The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, curated by Peter Weibel in 2016 …

Yes! In that exhibition, we changed the setting every one or two months—just like in theater, where you have different acts and stage designs. Accordingly, we also integrated sound and invited various participants to interpret the images. The idea at ZKM was that although the photos were framed like in a gallery show, they were hung on mobile walls—the kind used in opera or theater as movable backdrops. This created a tension between fiction and documentation. I played with the temporal and spatial scales of theater. The team consisted of six people—designers, scenographers, and sound designers: Jan Kieswetter, Giuseppe Ielasi, Alina Schmuch, Heike Schupelius, Martha Schwindling, and Linda Van Deursen.

Is this desire to document the Anthropocene scenically and variably also a way of pointing out that, despite all the documentary coldness and detachment, these images still reflect the perspective of Armin Linke, the auteur?

Certainly. And there’s also a certain irony—as if the utopia of the future being depicted is already outdated the moment it’s captured by the camera. That would be the Sisyphus effect: humanity continuously tries to build something new, while at the same time destroying what was once new. The entire effort carries a certain absurdity. Despite their often impressive subjects, I try to ensure my images are not celebratory but also capture the grotesqueness of human existence.

You’ve taken so many photographs in your life—several million—that you now rely on curators to go through your archives, to tag them and generate new ideas about how to form clusters and navigate your image corpus. To what extent have you perhaps already lost track of your own work, especially as you constantly produce new exhibitions and also continue photographing for future projects?

In some ways, I do lose track. But at the same time, interesting retroactive connections sometimes emerge. What’s important is that I tried from the beginning to archive all my images carefully—not in a bureaucratic way, but like a complex editing table.

What does such an editing table look like?

In the past, during film editing, the reels were organized and hung on a line so you could quickly access the material and try out an edit on the table—just to see whether a counter-shot worked or not. Editing was a bit like improvisational music, where the musicians always have their repertoire within reach—able to access it intuitively while being technically secure enough to try new combinations. In this sense, I never feared producing too much, because from the beginning I also searched for methods to stay on top of my production. It became a bit more complicated when film production was added—when the audio and time dimensions entered the archive of images. But the different media also made it more interesting.

There are more and more machine-made images—like those from outer space—that record frequencies we can’t perceive, or from the deep sea, where the images aren’t captured by lenses but by sonar waves moving through water. To decode and visualize them, you need computer software that can calculate and interpret those waves. The key point is this: today, images are datasets—not negatives. Today’s astrophysicists don’t even work with images in the classical sense. They work with vibrations, just like in music.

The same applies to language! During our Image Capital discussions, Estelle Blaschke and I began to explore how the financial capital of images no longer lies in the image itself, but in the text connected to it. Once again, an invisible image.

Exactly. I’m referring to how artificial intelligence learns from the way we humans describe images with words—on Instagram, WhatsApp, and elsewhere. This media transfer between language and image is of great interest to big tech companies working with big data, because it allows them to develop algorithms that translate images into language—and vice versa. These images are systematically fed into AI systems. In the end, the capital is no longer the image—it’s the text, the metadata. The metadata produced with every image is what really interests these companies and drives further development. It’s fascinating to realize that an image in photography has always also been a form of writing, a carrier of information. From the very beginning, photography has lived in this tension between image and text.

Because I work in the field of art, I can decide how my images are distributed—and that’s a fundamental part of the artistic process. Being aware that I’m not just producing an image, but also determining how it will circulate.

That’s exactly the challenge. It has truly become difficult to teach photography as a medium today.

In recent decades, our understanding of photography has fundamentally changed. Mainly because the camera has become part of our body—it’s always at hand, integrated into our phones. Phone cameras are like exo-prosthetics. The images we produce can be shared and published instantly, or even generated by machines. When I started out, I could define myself as a photographer based on a certain investment. I bought a large-format or medium-format camera like a Rolleiflex or a Hasselblad. I invested in a tool, learned to master it so completely that I could forget the technical side and focus entirely on my ideas and on developing a personal visual language.

That’s no longer necessary—or even possible—to the same extent. Today, the questions are: Why am I producing this image? How do I distribute it, process it? Can I program the algorithm so that it creates from my image what interests me? Do I use open-source algorithms—or ones hidden inside a tech company’s black box? What are the ethical implications of the technical choices I make? And maybe, in the end, the goal isn’t even to produce images myself anymore—but to find them?

With the kind support of the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf