Enno Kaufhold
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Introductory speech to the exhibition "biologica" in Fotogalerie Friedrichshain 2000 |
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| Dear Amin, Dear Bettina, Dear Guests, The exhibition about which I am to speak this evening shows both portraits of people with animals and floral still life compositions. If Amin El Dib were not clearly the authentic source of both subjects, it would seem puzzling - given two such divergent subjects and styles - how they both could stem from the camera of very same person. Certainly, there are formal similarities, such as the square formats or the black and white photography with a noticeable emphasis on the gray tones. Again, the motifs look so different, and the recent still lifes must astound even someone who has followed Amin El Dib's photography for a while. Let us begin with the portraits - the lively arrangements of people and animals, a theme that Amin El Dib has been photographing for a good decade. These people-animal portraits have been shown in segments, but the recent images selected and shown here are undergoing their first public view in this particular combination. The selection accents those depictions, in which the people appear more or less unclothed. Even depictions of people in customary combinations with animals, i.e. clothed, raise questions for the viewer, but even more questions arise when people have their clothes off. As one always hears and keeping with the aspect of nakedness, the intimacy between keepers and the animals they keep goes quite deep - primarily in regard to cats and dogs but even also with other animals. The animals even have a place in pet owners' beds; maybe the owners sleep naked under the covers. In the photographs of Amin El Dib we do not so much encounter this kind of potential night scene as much as we see the result of his encounters with pet owners; without explicit instructions or pressure from the photographer they voluntarily set aside their clothes as a reaction to the given situation. At the same time, Amin El Dib did not view theses scenic developments with distaste, and therefore he embraced the resulting situation and photographed his motif. Otherwise, he would not have thematically grouped the resulting images together for the exhibition. The nakedness does in fact shed new light on the relationship between humans and animals. Purely incidentally we are reminded of how artificial our clothes are and that we rely on them only because we have lost our original fur over the course of evolution. Animals are simultaneously clothed in their fur or feathers and naked. For them it is not an issue. The depicted individuals are largely the ones who react to the photographer in their nakedness during portrait sessions - and even more so during nude shoots. A tension arises from this confrontation, which also carries a certain erotic element. The fact this can factor into people-animal partnerships is something else, and if it does, then the eroticism is one-sided and stems from the pet owner. In his early people-animal portraits, and as shown here, Amin El Dib underscores something commonly known, namely that people sometimes have strange inclinations in conjunction with animals. However, he does not take it to a denigrating extreme, as Diane Arbus demonstrated in her pictures, for example. Instead, certain peculiarities of the portrayed individuals tend to come to light - peculiarities we all have, even if they are ultimately different and seem strange for the outsider. Pointing this out allows the viewer to accept something that should not be taken so beastly seriously. Throughout the history of art animals have appeared in allegorical and symbolic contexts and as status symbols. This is by no means the case in Amin El Dib's people-animal pictures, with perhaps one exception. Here I am referring to his series, in which a snail travels across the face and then across the eye of a woman. Snails embody the essence of slowness. Given the context of the fast-moving images and motifs that surround us, slowness is significant for Amin El Dib, in that his images require time to be looked at. A quick cursory glance does not suit them. And the snail reminds us that animals have time and are not subject to the impatient urgings that humans experience. The animals are perhaps carried along by the restless activity of their owners, but by nature they have no sense of time and behave themselves in a correspondingly timeless manner. Animals have time, hours, days. As Amin El Dib can attest, this too is a challenge for the photographer. At first glance it seems confusing that after working with the human-animal theme for a long time, Amin El Dib most recently discovered his interest in still life. However, by extending his gaze into the garden of nature and photographing plants and flowers he comes full circle in terms of the biology of organisms. For plants, animals and humans belong to a single biological category. This explains the exhibition title: "biologica". Thus, he completes this triad with his new motifs. Despite the increasing variety of the colorful world of images around us, Amin El Dib has photographed this new series of floral still lifes in black and white. And by no means has he simply imitated or created variations on familiar flower motifs. There is no trace of aesthetically highly cultivated flower arrangements, such as Robert Mappelthorpe photographed parallel to his portraits and erotic photographs. The typical concept of a floral image does not apply to Amin El Dib's motifs at all. The fact that the subject matter is cut flowers can be recognized particularly clearly, when some of the minimalistic motifs expose a cut stem. To me the abstracted views are more noticeable and significant, in which blossoms and stems undergoing the process of natural decay create unusual pictures, which are then partially distorted by the glass of the vase. The works are different from those of Karl Blossfeldt, who distilled his fundamental forms of art from an intensive study of botany and its diversity and for whom the elements of nature and photographic technique were organically compounded. In contrast, Amin El Dib photographed his floral motifs in an act of immediate experience, in which the type of the plant was less important to him than the natural aspect of transition from bloom to decay. In terms of the selection of the motif it makes no difference which species of flower he photographs, for this is inconsequential to the gradual nature of decomposition. For this reason too Amin El Dib has no symbolic associations with specific flowers. They are first supposed to fascinate with their pure being and then allure with their physical substance in a way that ultimately carries the photograph. The fact that these aesthetic but ultimately picturesque protocols of natural decay take on a metaphorical quality also cannot be overlooked. Like a momento mori they remind us of the finite quality of our life. Returning to the difference between the people-animal portraits on the one hand and the still lifes on the other, we can seemingly most easily approach an answer to the question of what combines the two through elements of form and technique. By selecting the square format Amin El Dib has assumed a formal position, which is certainly customary but generally uncommon. As you know, rectangular formats dominate in photography. However, square pictures pose a greater challenge to the photographer in terms of creating an aesthetic formal composition, when one must aesthetically organizes the central elements of the photograph within the square. The danger of a boring composition is a much greater. Amin El Dibs compositions indicate a certain orientation toward the center in terms of the horizontal, vertical and diagonal axes. Still, he is able - and this is the particular appeal of the images - to disrupt this formal harmony. It is the details that disrupt the harmony. In terms of beauty and aesthetics, the floral still lifes demonstrate something that also applies to the people-animal portraits, namely that Amin El Dib does not believe in pure beauty. In each of his pictures he shows us the beautiful within the ugly and the ugly within the beautiful. I believe this is a dialectic, which makes sense in conjunction with visual appearances. Independent of Amin El Dib's leanings, the viewer is free to discover whether he is more drawn to the beautiful or the ugly. As I now conclude and free the path to the pictures, you now can see for yourself what captivates you the most, the beautiful or perhaps the ugly. And if you are drawn to the ugly, perhaps that is what you simply find beautiful at the moment. In my opinion, this is not only possible but evem likely. Enno Kaufhold e-mail: mail@enno-kaufhold.de |
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