June has been a busy few month for Bastian Gehbauer. The Berlin-based photographer started the month with a solo exhibition, PORTAL, and he has another show running with Studio Berlin at Berghain, which re-opened its doors to the public a week later. For someone whose name is cropping up as one of Berlin’s artists to watch, Bastian is refreshingly forthcoming, happy to not only discuss his work but to open it to interrogation, to wonder about it alongside you. This inquisitiveness, the will to see things as they really are, and to reveal the dimensions of them that are less immediately obvious, permeates his work. When confronted by Bastian’s compositions, we see things that are true, and the solidity of that truth and the clarity of it remain with us.
Your work often seems to be about redeveloping naturally existing forms, or perhaps identifying new forms in existing ones. What, for you, is the relationship between the forms elucidated in your photographs and the physical forms themselves?
Photography is a medium that can describe our surroundings quite accurately as a technical representation. During the last years I have tried to enhance this quality through the usage of extraordinary cameras with the highest resolution possible. My intention was to find abstraction in concrete, manifest images, a paradox in a way, but possible.
I guess that what you’re referring to is related to this. Man made spaces have always a certain geometry within their construction that I am playfully using to reach abstraction. The spaces kind of vanish and turn into compositions of graphical shapes, ellipses, squares, triangles etc.
You’ve said that your photographs refer more to emotional states than particular “places.” And yet, of course, much of your work captures constructed spaces, the interiors of rooms, the exteriors of buildings. Is there something in particular about these physical areas that communicates with emotional space?
You are absolutely right, since there always has to be something physical when photographing there is necessarily a connection to the very space I am taking a picture of.
What I am rather referring to is photography as a medium that we use to describe something we call reality. Doubtlessly an image can refer to the world as a document, but this is not something that interests me. Take “Beschusskammer” for example. It’s a space where the military is testing the impact from bullets on cars and other objects. I didn’t take the picture to describe the place or the procedure of this action, this is simply irrelevant to me. I took the image to capture a glimpse of what it feels to stand in a dome of massive, corroded but impervious steel. To get a feeling of its intensity, the materiality, the volume, the brutal strength.
My images are always staged. The space of “Beschusskammer” never looked like that before and after I took the shot, because I built a huge lightning set up only for the image. I did all that to create a surrounding referring visually to the way I see the space and how I emotionally relate to it instead of taking an image that truthfully describes the space one-to-one.
In “Beschusskammer” you have an absolute concrete space, but the circle on the floor, or the rectangular “altar” in the center and also the light distract our monocausal observation of the space. Thoughts get elevated in other directions.
What is it, would you say, that distinguishes the eye of an expert photographer from that of an amateur?
An amateur has the gift of being impartial.
Are there particular types of spaces that you tend to seek out in your photography?
I think spaces must talk to me to arouse my interest. It might only be a whisper and can come from an everyday kind of surrounding, but it has to stimulate me emotionally.
You’re still fairly early in your career – what do you see as the trajectory to your work up to this point? What are you moving towards, what are you moving away from?
I was starting with documentary photography but after years of intense questioning of both photography as a medium and the things and spaces I was taking images of, I came closer to the stuff that matters to me personally.
So I would say I am moving away from a straight and descriptive perspective of the world surrounding me, towards a more introspective abstraction which leaves the observer of my work more room for his/her personal encounters. In the end my images do not attempt to tell you what to see but rather ask what you are willing to see and why.
I am sure that consciously or subconsciously good art is an honest expression of what deeply matters to the artist and therefore also builds a bridge to the observer.
Visit SLEEK ART store to purchase a special Edition by Bastian Gehbauer.