Texts on the work of Katja Liebmann

If Photography had never been invented, we might be dreaming of it still when we look through windows into the street, through car windscreens or out from our seats on buses, trams and trains. Each of these is an apparatus for making images, the city becoming indelible even as it quickly vacates our vision.

But despite the voraciousness of this vision in motion, the city also gives itself to us half hidden, smeared by movement, by rain or dirt, by the transience of the gaze we bring to bear on it. There is the alchemy of photographic processes that will soon be two centuries old, the blurring or distorting effects of cheap, simple cameras and lenses, the Plato's-cave shadow realm of the camera obscura, and a variety of textured supports for the finished image.

Nowhere more so than in Liebmann's photographs, from the late 1980s to the present, of certain cities. Berlin, London, New York: they appear quite recognizable but occluded, their views and local details transformed or half hidden behind overlapping images, streaming windows, the swarming grain or imperfect resolution of "primitive" techniques and technology.

Liebmann's work smears distinctions between photography and painting, photography and drawing, photography and printmaking, perhaps even photography and writing. Here cities are spectral reminders of themselves, of their histories and their histories of image-making.

Liebmann's blurred, overlapping or seemingly double-exposed pictures give us nothing more or less than the image of imagination. As Woolf puts it, "There is a fixity, a gloom, yet an inner glow that seem to hint that you are looking within and not without."

Kierkegaard lesend No. 5" is the title Katja Liebmann gave to a photographic self-portrait from 2002. Her head is depicted from the front, viewed from above, with her chin resting on her left hand. Beneath it lies a sheet of white paper on an open double-page — yet the artist will not actually be able to read the text in such a position.

The concept behind this small series of nine images is that the implied reading time corresponds exactly to the camera's exposure time: thinking coincides with seeing and with being seen in the image.

Her employment of photographic processes is closer to téchne than to mere technique — a form of craft that accompanies intellectual processes in order to make them visible. The use of old and obscure photographic processes are not merely procedures for creating visual effects, but evidence of an intensive engagement with the fundamentals of human perception.

One of Søren Kierkegaard's major works from 1843 bears the title "Die Wiederholung" (Repetition). For him, repetition is one of the fundamental principles by which the individual orients itself in the world — and this is precisely where Katja Liebmann's artistic concept starts.

Over three decades of intensive work, Katja Liebmann has developed an oeuvre that is as idiosyncratic as it is unique, thereby securing her a prominent place in the history of photography.

She has engaged with the history of the medium and works with apparatus from the dawn of photography including self-made pinhole cameras, or simple fix-focus cameras. This reticence in the photographic process is part of her strategy.

The long exposure time offers the possibility of recording the interplay and concurrence between incidents. The result of the extended exposure shows us moments and situations that in reality we could not see; our eyes do not exist in this way. Series, sequence and repetition are methods of presentation in which the single motif finds confirmation and continuation.

In the images the viewer sees time embodied. Actions that have a time factor are noticeable, events in front of the camera have a longer duration which in turn, due to the exposure time of the camera can only be captured in detail. On the other hand, short term events disappear; passersby become shadows, perceptions of time change.

The intimacy between the artist and the apparatus, as much as that between the apparatus and the external world leads to a pureness of the event and an exceptional convergence with the world in which we live.