curating.org
Master Project
Susanne Bernhard Gross
Perfectly Boring – The Aura of the Gas Station
Photography belongs to the modern human being. What once began with portrait photography has become an integral part of everyday life, in science, in (war and catastrophe) reporting and in the art world, i.e. in museums. Man learns about the world through the image, also the beauties of nature. When the naked eye is confronted with the same encounters and objects that photography shows us, it is often disappointed. The camera guides, dramatizes, didactizes (already selectively) the eye and thus the perception of our environment, our world – an exaggeration of the real can arise. That images lie is not news. Since images can be digitally copied and manipulated by anyone, the question of the value of the original no longer arises. The understanding of reality and its image is questioned. Instead, we are concerned with topics such as “simulated hyper-reality” or “virtual becoming”.
The focus of my work is the artistic object and its effect through the depicted contents and not the sophisticated technology in its rapid change. These are the photographic images – portraits, landscapes, buildings or the thing itself – that deal with a political social body of thought. In today’s picture generation, in which viewers can access the pictorial material of advertising in the mass media and Hollywood films, the concept of photography has changed.