Texts / Reviews

Christoph Ribbat
One is the loneliest number

»In photography«, says Jeff Wall, »the unattributed, anonymous, poetry of the world itself appears, probably for the first time«. Its beauty »is rooted in the great collage which everyday life is, a combination of absolutely concrete and specific things created by no-one and everyone, all of which become available once it is unified into a picture«.1

Actually, he’s right. The »unattributed, anonymous poetry«, the »great collage«, all the »concrete and specific things«: these are what photography—unique, addictive, casual, potent, improvised photography—deals with and what it is de­rived from. It is what the photobook deals with and is derived from, this magical admixture of film, novel and family album, which only now we have really come to appreciate.2

However, it is strange to believe, as Wall apparently does, that the things, spaces and faces from everyday life have the capacity to be »unified into« a single picture. Even more remarkably, a significant movement within contem­porary photographic art has distanced itself from the fantastic charm of the
pictorial narrative and become more interested in the rather sober solitaires on the wall and the perspective from a safe distance. It is precisely the most prominent photographers, inundated with money and fame, who tend towards aristocratic minimalism. They labour on the uncluttered, gigantic single picture for the uncluttered, gigantic museum. Alternately, they devote themselves to the systematic sequence. The individual element is constructed as a—hrrumpf—serial phenotype: shopping centres, libraries, always viewed from the same angle, always in the same light. Even Jeff Wall ultimately doesn’t trust his much vaunted accident, preferring to stage his tableaux himself. In this way he creates disorder ordered by himself, including those concrete things and their unattributable poetry.

All of this is astonishing because such artistic practises clearly differentiate themselves from the other, everyday, snapshot world of photography. They distance themselves, possibly consciously, from us, the lay public who very seldom perceive photographic images as monumental individual entities, mostly encountering them in pairs, as groups, in heaps: along the lines of before-and-after, this-is-me-here-and-this-is-me-there, look-at-this-and-look-at-that.

Perhaps these free-range herds of images intimidate many a photographic artist because they threaten his sanitary method. In everyday life the simple bumps into the decorative, the delicate encounters the dangerous, the repulsive links arms with the delectable. Images generate narratives. They have firm sets of meanings. They have symbolic value. This is difficult to countenance if you view the photographic image as a mysterious monad, which, silent and perfect, doesn’t require anything around it but empty space (and plenty of it).

Ute Behrend’s works are different, however. They come in twos. Always in twos. Instead of meticulously dissecting the dual components of what you see and what that might signify, Behrend infuses her series of images with both elements. She fears neither disorder nor decoration, neither ornament, children’s eyes, pink petals, turquoise dressing gowns, rubber plants, pierced nipples, rottweilers, nor pools of blood. She takes private photographs, but this is an undefinable kind of privacy, temporally localised as the present day, in a place situated somewhere between the city and country and vacation spots, of a generation between youth and mid-life. One’s eye oscillates between one and the other image. It compares, contrasts, combines, engendering in turn mini-narratives that start on the left and end on the right or start on the right and end on the left. Or they become long narratives encompassing several images—narratives that branch out, leaf, blossom.

For goodness sake no stories, no plants—say the coolest minimalists. For goodness sake no minimalism, says Ute Behrend. You have to cope with pro­lifera­tion. Photosynthesis, 6 CO2 + 6 H²O → C6H12O6 + 6 O2, the transformation of light into greenery that then spreads out over surfaces and grows into voids: nobody can deny that this is all part of the »great collage«. Therefore one really is the loneliest number, because it cannot do justice to disorder. One image wouldn’t be enough, a typological series would be too strict, a mise en scène too clinical.

Ute Behrend’s video art also testifies to the power of this approach—perpetually split in two, as is her photographic work. At the start of her video »Mermaids«, for example, the sun is shining through a gap in the heavy, grey clouds pictured in the image on the left and in the image on the right, in front of a blank wall, a woman is singing a Harry Warden/Mack Gordon-Song, which one recognises from Chet Baker’s version (» …the more I see you, the more I want you / Somehow this feeling just grows and grows …«) and perhaps because this woman does this so well, singing so unpretentiously, as unpretentiously as Chet Baker himself, and because sometimes the sun really does pierce through the grey canopy in this fashion, as indeed everyone knows, and because the sound of the surf can also be heard on the soundtrack and children’s voices can be discerned discussing something and then fading into the distance once more, and because a bird suddenly flies in front of the clouds across the image and then disappears, and because all of this is the case, it seems for a moment as if nothing else exists apart from these clouds, the sound of the surf, the light, the song, the way it is being sung and the way the song is remembered, and the bird in flight and the bird that has flown and the voices and the quietness that follows.

And at this point it becomes clear: true purism is the one that also incorporates the noise. It is the one that both shows what we see and what we remember:
the voice and the rushing sound, the moment and its feedback. Ute Behrend’s photographic series allow you to experience this haptically, laying these combinations in your hands, in the photobook, the ultimate storehouse for what Jeff Wall calls »anonymous poetry«. Look right. Look left. Look left. One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.3


1 Zitiert in: Kaja Silverman, »Totale Sichtbarkeit«. Jeff Wall: Photographs. Köln 2003. S. 97–117; hier S. 111.
2 Vgl.: Martin Parr und Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Vol. I & II. London 2004/2006;
Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. New York 2001.
3 Aimée Mann, »One«. Magnolia: Soundtrack. Warner, 2000. CD (Text & Musik: Harry Edward Nilsson, 1968).

… nothing but the first stirrings of terror

Dr. Kerstin Stremmel
Zimmerpflanzen by Ute Behrend

The title of Ute Behrend’s group of works and her book of the same name
suggests an instruction­al guide on how to conduct the careful greening of life, a sort of compendium of luxurious blooms. Houseplants can indeed be viewed along sociological lines, even if the era of the orangery is over; garden­ing books no less speak of the burgeoning interest during the 80s and 90s in the greenification of interior spaces in view of the increasing devastation of the environ­ment. A mass taking-flight is implied, possibly. It rarely seems to be successful though, the undertones are sceptical, a fiddle-leaf fig seems as equally aggress­ive as the rottweiler in the adjacent picture, the treat­ment of plants is not always loving, but tells the tale of neglect (dried-up palm) or of inveterate blunders in matters of taste (chrysanthemums): these plants in­cluding their little plastic pots have been immersed in hydro cultures to such an extent that they appear to be drowning.

In actual fact what we are really dealing with is a manual on how to see. One look at the photo­graphs—in which delightful motifs such a delicate pink flow­ers with yellowish-green, almost phosphorescent blossoms are rare—is clearly not enough. The reason for this is Behrend’s consis­tent decision to opt for pairs of images, one photo commenting upon or counteracting the other, and, alongside correspondences in colour, there are also contextual references, occasion­ally drastic ones.

A meadow with summer flowers is paired with the image of two traffic cones, between them—beneath a dark tarpaulin—a narrow rivulet of blood has trickled out across the brick pavement. The fact that the brickwork is arranged in the form of a cross is accentuated by the chosen framing of the shot. The flower motif in the adjacent image is lent a completely different dimension through the highly associative nature of this street scene, itself an evocative individual image in its own right, when the viewer now attempts to penetrate the tangle of fronds and blossoms in a counter glance—all of a sudden it has taken on something quite eerie, reminiscent of the apparently untroubled surface reality of a David Lynch film beneath which things are seething and redolent of the fact that menace is lurking at the heart of the idyll, indeed that beauty is sometimes really nothing but the first stirrings of terror. Images such as these exempli­fy just how far removed her conceptual approach is from the mere snapshot: research was necessary for the motifs that tell of everyday police-life, as indeed was the case with other subject areas in order to get to the bottom of particular matters, which only seem to find purchase the majority of our lives in the form of the tabloid headlines.

This feeling that an abyss lurks behind every façade is intensified by the admixture of internal and external shots: a curtain emblazoned with a flower­ed pattern veils the view of the greenery outside, the upper two thirds of the image are
completely obscured by an orange blind. The window is no longer a window on the world, but instead points the viewer back in the direction of him or herself and intensifies the effect of the second image whose scenario is at best equivocal:
if the woman’s arm resting on her hip can be taken to expresses a degree of
self-confidence, equally the man’s grip around the woman’s narrow upper arm appears too firm to be a truly gentle gesture—in every idyllic dream home a nightmare of violence and aggression. Behrend begins her search for material with police operations and sex trade shows, but is able to locate menace, or at least strange things, in less clearly classifi­able situations. Even the view of a
tree house, the only access to which seemingly a much too tiny step ladder, juxtaposed with the close-up of a woman’s torso (woman in a red dress with a green balloon), seems like an hermetic hideaway, and the quality of the works resides in the fact that any conclusions one might draw are left up to individual interpretation.

On occasion this gives rise to a brand of poetry shot through with reality, poetry with which anyone who knows Ute Behrend’s work is likewise fam­iliar. Already apparent in the »Märchen« series—which also contains classical ingredients of fairy tales such as fly agaric toadstools, forest clearings, spinning wheels, bears and deer—Behrend departs from photography’s reality principle in an original manner: nothing is every just what it appears to be on the surface, photo­graphy is a trace of what has been there, but at the same time a game of gestures and memories opens up beyond what was merely visible in front of the camera. And all of this takes place without a bombastic mise-en-scène, trusting in a capacity for memory, which is not merely accessible in the standard childhood repertoire of motifs. It calls upon experiences that one can feel physically when viewing the images: the feeling of being upside down whilst one is being securely held, discomfort when walking through dense shrubbery, the taste of forest fruits which can be seen directly juxtaposed with the deadly fly agaric toadstool, all of which can become the source of stories arising from details.

I recently encountered the term »thigmotropism«: »thigmotropism is the directional response of a plant organ to touch or physical contact with a solid object. This directional response is gener­ally caused by the induction of some pattern of differential growth«. Something similar happened with Ute Behrend’s care­fully compiled »Houseplants«: they change with contact, each and every doubling-up generating new meanings which appear to be compelling and at the next viewing, depending upon one’s particular disposition, can head off in a completely diffe­rent direction. This openness isn’t an objection to the suggestive power of the combinations, but rather the expression of an approach, which profits from the sheer bandwidth of photographic references to the world. And hence it is poss­ible for there to be images of floral frost patterns on windowpanes interspersed among the others. Alongside the shrill cold they produce a particular beauty that surprisingly is reflected in the dress of a small girl in the neighbour­ing image. The pair of images—complimenting one another both sensually and con­text­ually— take on a haptic quality; one feels the structure of the floral frost patterns and probably re­members the feeling of one’s skin sticking slightly when tracing the pattern with one’s finger across the pane, immediately understand­ing in the same way why the girl is wearing a cotton shirt beneath the polyester dress festooned with blue floral frost patterns. Ute Behrend’s unsenti­mental eye penetrates to the heart of the matter and yet certain subjects appear to be there in order for her to find them once more in her photographs.

Dr. Barbara Engelbach
Ute Behrend – Märchen

Exhibition on the occasion of the Toyota-Fotokunstpreises / Toyota-Photography-Art-Award 2004

Fairytales are more than children’s stories... They display fundamental truths and wisdom. If there is a collective unconscious then fairytales are surely firmly anchored within it, and whoever is prepared to get involved in them can find them everywhere, knowing fully well that all will always end well.

Cologne-based artist Ute Behrend, born in 1961 in Berlin, has received the biennial Toyota Prize for Photography. She was able to convince the jury with her artist’s books, Girls, Some Boys and Other Cookies, published by Scalo and now Fairytales, appearing with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.
‚Fairytales’ is also the title of her presentation at the Museum Ludwig, for which Ute Behrend has made a selection of ca.30 photographs from the series of the same name.

Whether it is the The Valiant Little Tailor, impressing his contemporaries because they interpret "Seven at one stroke!" to be referring to fully-grown men and not flies, or the princess in The Frog King getting over her feelings of disgust and giving the cold and slippy reptile a kiss – these well known fairytales are related to images that everyone recalls.
Often it is particularly the simple narrative structures of fairytales, conveying a sense of ‘deeper wisdom’, that is still occupying cultural philosophers, psychoanalysts and theologians today.
Such images, however, are not to be found in Ute Behrend’s book of FAIRYTALES. Her photorgaphs do not illustrate fairytales, but the artist picks up fairytale themes to find and discover new images and to give them their own associative space.

The fairytale, Frog King, appears, for instance, as a hand with outstretched fingers, covered in glossy green-coloured slime (alt: a slippy mass of paint). This photograph is opposed with another, on which two girls can be seen, sporting princess dresses. One has its back turned to the camera, the other its face covered with her hands. Allusions to the fairytale are being conjoured-up, without the photographs letting themselves be merged in a linear narrative. Behrend often finds her motifs in the intimacy of the associated area of her family or circle of friends and less frequently the artist might ask strangers if they be photographed.
All photographs convey a directness- partly due to the subject’s steadfast gaze into the camera- that renders the question superfluous, whether these are staged or real situations.
Like her idols, e.g. Sally Mann, with whom she shares the interest in photographing children, or Diane Arbus, whose discoveries of the special in the profane and whose metamorphoses of the droll to the normal also can be found in Behrend’s photographs. She also shares the interest in finding the universal in the fleeting, and like all of these Ute Behrend also banks on the (powers of) evidence of the photographic image

At the same time Ute Behrend has developed a position of her own, because of her consistency in working with pairs of images. Her rejection of the single image is distinct from rows of photographs or photographic sequences for which there could be a renewed selection or compilation at any time or in which photography approaches film.
Behrend has her pairs of images fixed and sticks to that arrangement in publications and exhibitions. As such the photographs are visual echoes of each other or counterparts: correspondences or contrasts, referred aspects of content and form are to be discovered. Visual powers of association that precede the language-systems are being encouraged. Thus Behrend enables an emotional sounding-board for her image pairs, without it being possible to verbalise how feelings of ‘being touched’ or of uneasiness are inherent in the photographs.
The tension in the relationship between recorded every-day situations on one hand, and the timeless narratives and fairytales to which Behrend refers to on the other, is being conserved in the associations that are called-up, as also a recognition that is informed by experience and memory and that escapes consciousness.

Dr. Barbara Engelbach, June 2005