Dr Sophie Junge
Wasteland
Describing a photograph by Valentin Blank isn’t easy. His images have consistent tonality, are cleverly composed, and printed with precision. In their balance of color and clarity of composition his cityscapes appear familiar, unequivocal, nearly trivial – urban areas, backyards, industrial zones. But the supposed familiarity of the depicted locales is misleading. Blank’s photographs withdraw from view and resist interpretation. They reveal nothing. «Do not look at me, it’s hardly worth it,» they seem to impart to the careful observer. But don’t let yourself be turned away.
«A79» is the name given by Blank to the photograph of an urban wasteland. His camera is gazing into a backyard. It is positioned at some distance from the backyard, so that initially one’s gaze wanders over the cracked grey paving stones in the foreground. A neatly clipped hedge stands in the middle of the image. It is short and evenly trimmed, hardly larger than a single bush. And yet it obstructs the clear view of a white Mercedes to the left. Only the car’s front with its reflecting windshield and missing license plate is visible.
On the left in the photograph, three black Mannheim Waste Management residual waste bins are neatly lined up according to size. In composition they form a gently running diagonal and formally continue the rectangular shape of the hedge. These visual elements are arranged in front of the grey back wall of a tall, nearly square multipurpose building. The end of its side wall is delineated by a metal rain gutter, to which is attached a small security camera. It would be nice if it returned the viewer’s gaze. Instead, its rectangular eye peers sideways, out of the photograph. So one’s gaze wanders over the extensive emptiness of the wall in the middle ground. Like a grey canvas, it blocks us from looking into the image.
The photograph can be described successfully only by listing the separate visual elements. How they relate to each other is not clear at first, because Blank refrains from offering a formal hierarchy of the depicted objects. Thus, the rectangular hedge designates the center of the photograph and the waste bins stand in a neat row, yet the relationship of the objects to each other and within the space cannot be comprehended. Blank’s photographic perspective formally avoids a hierarchical structuring of pictorial space. He apparently treats all visual elements equally and extricates them from a common narrative. Like the clipped hedge whose triangular plot is bordered by a low stone border, each element in the photograph remains separate. The hedge takes the liberty of growing slightly over that border. But Blank does not grant it its own space in his composition. In this way he ostensibly avoids all tension in the image, even that between landscape and cityscape, between the green leaves of the hedge and the grey stone of the paving slabs.
It is the unrelated nature of the elements in the image that arouses suspicion. On its own, each element appears familiar; depicted collectively, they resist interpretation. The objective photograph all but slips into abstraction. Blank raises this lack of relation to a higher power by cutting down the chromaticity of the entire photograph. He reduces the photograph’s legibility by narrowing the tonal scale. In drab grey he presents the cloudy sky, the back wall of the building, the stone slabs on the ground. Even the green of the hedge, which could have shone in contrast with the orange car lights, feels dull and flat. The reduced chromaticity not only robs the image of its depth, but exponentially increases its illegibility. It drapes the photograph with a veil and shuts off the image from the probing gaze of the viewer. No access allowed.
Blank robs the photographed space of its identity. The urban space in the image thus becomes a cypher for meaningless emptiness, to be found everywhere and nowhere: a piece of urban wasteland, unused, uncultivated, uninspiring. Initially the familiar triteness of this non-locality evokes indifference. And yet, together with the security camera, I begin to wait. I wait for someone to appear and get into the car or open the lid of the waste bin. Despite the formal distance and the staged vacancy of the image, the signs of people who walk across this space, who drive the car, who dispose of their trash, are omnipresent. Their absence amplifies the emptiness of the image, because it makes us aware of their former presence. The image can refer to the traces of their activity, but in the photograph, only the empty space of their erstwhile presence remains.
An (analog) photograph is simultaneously evidential and descriptive in its ontological interpretation: as an icon it is connected through a structural resemblance with the object in the picture. As an index it proves the physical connection between the camera and the place captured by it. It reproduces this smidgeon of contact and confirms the credibility of the photographic image. «It is what was,» says Roland Barthes in his remarks on photography in Camera Lucida, 1980. The reference to the absence of people makes the empty space doubly palpable, because the photographic image can show the trace a person has left, but his presence in the image is lost forever. In Blank’s photography it is the absence of the person, who has eluded the gaze, which makes the image lack vitality.
The photograph becomes a ghost, as Siegfried Kracauer writes in his 1963 essay collection The Mass Ornament, because «we are contained in nothing, and photography assembles fragments around a nothing.»
Blank took the picture in Mannheim, as revealed by the bright inscription on the black waste bins. Mannheim, Heidelberg’s ugly sister, is a town devoid of notable sights and tourists. Mannheim is a site of German mediocrity, a non-place in which Blank has found and photographed probably the most void site of urban usage: an urban wasteland that will hardly have appealed to his artistic vision. And yet his camera captures what is unworthy of representation. And the photographic representation alters the perception. The creative staging of the place transforms it into a space of societal representation. In staging its insignificance, Blank’s camera imbues it with meaning.
Michel de Certeau describes in his philosophical discourse The Practice of Everyday Life (Arts de Faires, 1980) how the knowledge of a city is gained only via the moving gaze of a person walking. It is through the usage of an urban space that it acquires meaning: «A space is a place with which you do something.» And so Blank’s camera does something with the place it shows. It takes the place’s picture, it appropriates the place. The camera’s gaze witnesses not only the emptiness and anonymity of the grey backyard. In the act of photographing it, Blank sizes it up, makes the backyard visible and declares it a creatively and socially relevant space.
The power of staging a photograph comes into play here: Blank deprives his photography of color and identity and thus maximizes the desolation of the photographed space. Through visualizing via the photographic image, Blank imbues the Mannheim backyard with relevance. The artistic staging turns it into an image of human non-relatedness. The photograph becomes a medium with which to reflect on the meaning of urban wastelands outside the scope of defined social usage possibilities. Because the urban space is always also a social space, derived from social power relations, collective knowledge, common usage and individual creative freedom, as described by Henri Lefebvre in his sociology of space, The Production of Space (La Production de l’espace), 1974.
In its design, usage or emptiness, Blank’s backyard urban space becomes a mirror of social relations. In the process, the empty facade in the center of the image reflects the gaze of viewers and challenges them to take a stance on the matter. Herein lies photography’s potential for social criticism. Nevertheless Blank’s photography is distinctly different from the socio-documentary photography of the underclass, urban poverty and homelessness. He ventures less into direct reproduction of social misery. But through its artistic staging, the place’s vacant forlornness can be understood as a critical reflection on social space and social relationships.