Since 1997 Paris Photo has been dedicated to creating a platform for the variety of the photographic medium. With this regard to the mission of Paris Photo, Anita Beckers will present a selection of four artists whose work differs greatly, but is nevertheless in dialogue with each other and photography as a whole.

Presented artists: Anton Corbijn, Christiane Feser, Jürgen Klauke and Jonas Englert

In 2016, Anton Corbijn (*1955) presented a new series with never before produced musician portraits, shot between 1972 and 2014, including David Bowie, Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain, Nick Cave and Patti Smith. In the past twenty-five years, Anton Corbijn has, in addition to his music photography, photographed several artists from the worlds of film, to painting, writing and modeling.

In a very literal sense, Christiane Feser (*1977) has identified new facets to the question of what we actually see in a photograph. Her compelling works reject the traditional two- dimensional approach and constructs a three-dimensional layer that re-thinks the medium. However, her images are not abstract, but rather portray something that represents abstraction; recalling certain works of abstract art. But nothing is being represented here — because while something built in reality forms the departure point, it never existed in that form; what we see only “exists” in the picture.

Jürgen Klauke (*1943) is an artist whose work has greatly influenced the performative photography of the last forty years, through its continuous re-examination of our everyday reality and its sometimes ironic, but penetrating way of overcoming particular pain thresholds. His work ´Hängen im Karon´ show how he explores identity.

In contrast, Jonas Englert’s (*1989) videos works are more like ever-changing photographs that videos. His utilization of extreme deceleration creates an intimacy that is not usually captured on film, as they expose every gesture, regardless of how faint. His work ‘Stigma’ explores the gap between the own and the attributed identity of individuals. Recorded with 100 frames per second for 01:12 minutes as a plain sequence and slowed to four images per second to 30 minutes – thus resulting in a performative video format between film and painting, photography and moving image.

The selection of artists is a result of a carefully constructed conversation about the development of photography within the last forty years, both abstract and figurative. Klauke’s bold assertions of identity are broken down in Englert’s work in which the nuances are the focus. These nuances become concrete in the portraits of Anton Corbijn. In contrast, Feser examines the future of the photographic image through pushing the limits of perception. In this way, we want to show the various techniques that these artists employ to uniquely contribute to the development of photography as a whole.