Empirical Tableaux

SLEEK: Staging a photo is in itself a play on truth and fiction. What do you find so fascinating about it?

Thomas Friedrich Schäfer: Staging a photo involves making physical constructions with real objects. Yet they only exist for the construction and creation of an image. Once the photo has been taken, they’re dismantled. So in that sense they are ephemeral, like one event in a continuous flow, or a moment that slips quickly into the traces of time. What remains is the photograph (as photos always do), as a reminder of things that, by their very nature, can only have taken place in the past. So there’s a kind of inherent nostalgia to photos that mixes our insights from later experiences as we reevaluate our lived experience, on the one hand, and the gentle aura of our personal myths on the other.

In your next series Empirical Tableaux / Über das Gelingen (‘On Successful Outcomes’) (2018 –) you explore the topic of the perception and authentication of images through memory. Don’t memories always entail an element of omission?

It’s the omissions that create the void that needs filling – which the observer gets to fill by themselves. As Walter Benjamin wrote in A Berlin Chronicle (composed in 1932, but published in 1970), “Memory is an instrument for exploring not the past but its theatre.” The gaps in my works are obvious errors in the images: wobbles, blurs and overexposures that are designed to create an (old-style) familiarity and lead the observer to believe they can find something, or themselves, within the picture, or possibly even superimpose a memory of their own onto it.

Full interview available in SLEEK #70 – Truth