Untitled (Bouquet), Offset Prints, 85×60cm, 2014

Installation view, Helmhaus, Zurich, 2014

Now Playing

 

Roland Barthes’ Notes on Photography [1] contains a reproduction of a photograph from the second half of the nineteenth century: Lewis Payne, twenty-one years old, sits in a cell, his gaze turned directly at the camera. In April 1865, the veteran of the American Civil War had met with John Wilkes Booth and two other men in a room at the Kirkwood Hotel in Washington D.C. Booth shot Abraham Lincoln the following evening. Payne tried, and failed, to stab Secretary of State William H Seward; he was arrested and sentenced to death. Before his hanging on the 7th of July, 1865, the photographer Alexander Gardner took Lewis Payne’s portrait. “The photo is beautiful,” writes Barthes, “the young man is beautiful, too: that is the studium. The punctum, however, is this: he is going to die.” The punctum, according to Barthes, is not only the unexpected detail, “that pricks me (that wounds me also, strikes me.)” What becomes visible in the portrait of the young Payne waiting in his cell is a punctum of “density, time, the astounding emphasis of the noema (‘It-was-like-this’), its pure reproduction.

 

NOW PLAYING, reads the film poster in one of Jürgen Beck’s photographs. What is playing, when and where it being shown, cannot be made out. It is doubtlessly clear to the observer at a glance: what is being announced here, the promise that something is taking place, is no longer valid, the poster is now only a document, a source. Someone must have been there at that time, someone must have taken a seat, someone remembers, maybe even the observer herself. These images relate this alwaysalready-past moment, NOW PLAYING, of the now that has already taken place, that we believe we can remember, that has maybe become a myth in which we have taken part in one form or another, whether in film or in real life. Barthes writes of the révélation, a moment that is on the one hand an uncovering, but that is also a continuation, a development of the film.

 

So too do Beck’s images avoid uncovering the particular. They do not attempt to show what has happened in this or that time, what was then. All of the secrets remain unrevealed, the play is not shown, but the sets are kept; you can see stages, residues, time. Whether we can know the NOW of the past that the photographs show first hand, or whether we ourselves are standing in front of the same window in which the street behind us is reflected, or whether our memory is drawing on what we know of the past, is unclear. Through their abstraction, their focus on structures, contrasts, forms, the images condense their subject into a myth (of NOW). It is not the specific place, the specific time that is central, the photographs show archetypical spaces – we see spots of light, corners, shadows as déjà-vu, as though a brightly lit world is reproducing itself behind closed eye-lids.

 

1 Barthes, Roland: Notes on Photography, 1981

 

Dorothee Elmiger