Elisabeth Moortgat
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Catalogue contribution to "After Nature" - Interlude III
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| Cut flowers usually enjoy a brief existence as decorations for the interior or the garden. As quotes of nature, indications of sentiment, gestures of thanks or symbols for life, love and death, they are an element of ritualized interpersonal interactions. Held in vessels, they fill the world of objects with life; they are the price paid by civilized society for its distance and estrangement from primitive ways of life in and with nature. Their deceptive look-alike relatives, lifeless imitations made out of plastic, paper and silk, cannot compete, as the originals embody the cycle of growth and decay as pars pro toto. While the blossoms continue to emit a feeling of life force, they begin to decay from the moment they are cut.
Wilt and decay - that is the subject of the "CutFlowerPictures" (SchnittBlumenBilder) by Amin El Dib. The photographer of the series of twelve square, large-format images is interested in the flowers as metaphors for death. He composes dried blossoms, broken stems and plant matter rotting in a glass vase into repeatedly new images of transience. He is witness to the transubstantiation of organic materials, and with each motif of the series he documents a different state of decay. By creating the finest nuances of focused, unfocused, smeared and blurred compositional elements he achieves a subtle aesthetic of morbidity, an effect enhanced by the opaque sheen of the glass vase and selected reflections of light. Within the multi-layered spectrum of his metaphors are also images, in which a world of fantastical figures appears after all life has been exhausted from the plant. He arranges dead blossoms with and without stems like marionettes on a stage; they develop a life of their own and a particular tactile appeal within the space that is simulated by the finest gradations in depth of field. Flower still lifes like the "CutFlowerPictures" by Amin El Dib, which neither emote a vibrant fullness nor a sense of the eternal but which read as a symbol of transience or even memento mori, appear seldom in the imagery of the 19th and 20th centuries. Only the style termed "Nature morte" maintains the symbolism of death. In photography we are familiar with flower motifs as scientific documentation for lexical compendia or foremost as studies from the perspective of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) (Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger-Patzsch), as a poetic expression of beautiful objects (Marta Astfalck-Vietz), as light experiments (László Moholy-Nagy, Floris Neusüss) or as aesthetically obsolete artistic products (Imogen Cunningham, Thomas Florschuetz). Still images of dying nature are often an expression of the exploration of personal boundaries (Nabuyoshi Araki, Ursula Kelm, for example). The "CutFlowerPictures" of Amin El Dib also belong to this still world. In contrast to the picture-taking "agents of death" (Roland Barthes, 1980), who believe they can trap life in the images they capture, the photographer expresses his respect for life in metaphors of transience. Elisabeth Moortgat, Berlin 2002 |
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