MIXED MEDIA PHOTOGRAPHY
Mountain is the most conceptually vertiginous of the three
series in this respect, and one image in particular embodies
the various paradoxes involved. It depicts Mont Blanc: a
‘mountain of the mind’ that seems not to match in reality
the chilled abstraction of its idea – William Wordsworth, on
first seeing it, ‘grieved to have a soulless image on the eye
which had usurped a living thought’. Cramer’s Mont Blanc,
brittle and beclouded, has lost all sense of scale, so that it
might as easily be a model sculpted in the studio or a CGI
approximation of the ‘black drizzling crags’.
In the 1850s a craze for views of and visits to Mont
Blanc broke out in Britain. For those disinclined to Alpine
travel, stereoscopic views and panoramic entertainments
supplied the necessary vaporous whiff of the sublime, just as
Victorian aquaria preserved under glass and water a glimpse , 2006. All images c-type photograph, 104 x 104 cm,
of the deep time of fossil life alongside living creatures.
If Cramer’s photographs show us something like
a post-Romantic, post-environmental view of nature,
they do it by acknowledging that nature now is a kind of
science fiction. In that sense, the closest analogues to these
photographs – and they seem, like the peaks scaled by the Untitled (Underwater)
icy expansive vista, the dark punctum of the heroic subject first mountaineers, to continually gull us into seeing them for
set against the scene, all the familiar stage machinery of the what they are not – are cinematic, not photographic. The
muscular German sublime. And yet: he shares something, a clouds that shroud Cramer’s mountains recall the veil of fog
certain interest in the limits of the visible as such, with the around the dreaming planet in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris
most rigorous formulations of that aesthetic. And like the first (1972); his woodlands are like the eerily overgrown portions , 2006. Below:
writers to record their impressions of the higher reaches of of the Zone in Stalker (1979), where one might happen
air, rock and water, his photographs can often confuse one upon the ruins of the future. One has the sense – and here
space or substance with another, substitute one stratum the filmic exemplar would have to be Predator (1987) – that
of the representable world for its apparent double. Forests something at once visible and invisible is moving among
appear drowned or pelagic, the actual ocean bed looks like the leaves. Untitled (Mountain)
an aerial view of rainforest at night or resembles mountains
scurfed by snowdrifts that are actually seaweed. Daniel Gustav Cramer: Four Photographs is at the Goethe- Above: edition of 5, courtesy the artist and Domobaal, London
Cramer’s three ongoing series of medium-format Institut London until 23 September
photographs – Woodland (2002–), Mountain (2004–) and
Underwater (2006–) – are linked by their precise absence
of aspect. The ‘view’ vanishes in a kind of uncanny middle
distance: not far enough away from the mountain peaks
to compose a bracing vista, not close enough to the
undergrowth to seem forensic or hyperreal. Nor is there much
sense of narrative or scenography. It is only in the earliest of
the Woodland images, for example, that Cramer allows a
certain melodrama to intrude: a foreground of rain-jewelled
vegetation is sharply in focus, while the blurred background
looks like a badly painted stage flat. The whole scene might
be awaiting a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, such
is its air of stalled magic. Though the depth and darkness are
still there in later additions to the series, everything also exists
on a single plane: no foreground, no horizon, just a square
expanse of foliage without any route in or out.
Cramer’s ‘landscapes’, in other words, are really no such
thing, which is not the same as saying that they have nothing
to say about landscape. They are more like photographic
non-sites, subtle displacements of the territories in which
they were made: places (though we could name them: a
forest in Scotland, the Dolomites, the coast of Cyprus) whose
specificities are perhaps irrelevant to the project as a whole.
ARTREVIEW one.linzero.linfour.lin
p102-104 Mixed Media AR Jul07.in104 104 2/6/07 03:01:31
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