Rolf Sachsse
An Afternoon with Amin El Dib

Introduction to the book "Autonome Bilder"

Amin El Dib makes art with photography – this may first be understood in a literal sense. For him the medium is nothing more or less than a material, whose exploration is definitive of his oeuvre. The radicality of his approach unites him with artists of all periods and media; working from fundamental considerations of photography’s materiality and mediality, he determines the boundaries that he will transgress – primarily as a means of understanding where they lie. Wherein lies the beauty of decaying cut flowers, the recognizability of a person in a portrait, the integrity of an image that is being torn apart? At the root of each new question is a deliberation on what it intrinsically means to make images, to what extent it is an end unto itself, and at what point the autonomy of such art surpasses the limits of explanation – and all this is negotiated by means of the most established technical medium of the modern era, a medium that itself is in danger of becoming academic. As confidently as he drives through the hot city, so he finds his way through the thick undergrowth of aesthetic possibility in the art of photography, an art in also terms of its production process – in El Dib’s case, with few exceptions, a classical so-called analog, physical-chemical process. 

Amin El Dib works in extended series, which often occupy him for years; they accompany his life and, often enough, govern it for longer periods of time. In contrast, there are also specific moments of his life that have an effect on the development of some of his working processes and thus on the nature of his images. Such moments range from walks with the dog to family trips to Egypt and erotic obsessions. But often the technical processes intrinsic to photography define his work. What happens when printing a negative is just as exciting as the question of the size, cropping, gradation scale of images, and their placement on the page. El Dib owes a good deal of the radicality of his oeuvre to the fact that he approaches each parameter of his photographic work with equal seriousness. Nothing is so small that it could not alter the perception of his images. Every step of the entire working process – and in classical photography this is no small number – is examined individually, considered carefully, and decided in an unhurried manner. The calmness of his working process is immediately palpable when one looks at his works. Regardless how dynamic or exciting the subject matter is, each image is peacefully self-contained, forming a discrete cosmos. 

On the table in front of the bar at Café Einstein on Kurfürstenstrasse lies a meter-long apple strudel, the pastry of the day. However, the decision to accept the thus presented offer to the palate is only made once the pastry has been removed from sight after having being obscenely wounded and cut to pieces. The back and forth of the moment, the fascination of simultaneous attraction and repulsion is the core of the romantic aesthetic, and only once this was formulated and introduced into the works of important artists, could photography emerge as the primary technical medium of the modern era. The depictive medium was also the source of endless reproduction – as an extension of the prior medium of lithography – and also the epitome of a mechanistic depiction of space with a stringent central perspective. This is the ultima ratio of romantic painting and its expression of the pressing need for the absolute plausibility of a picturesque motive, which naturally assumes the artist’s physical presence at the site of the depicted events. Precisely sketched during travels and painstakingly reworked in the studio, the landscape became a prevailing motif. 

In his most recent series El Dib probes photography’s fundamental roots in romantic landscape painting. In works grouped under the succinct title Walking the Dog he shows empty tracts of forest and views of hills, often between day and dusk or also between seasons. Here one sees a late spot of snow in the beginnings of spring; there green and yellow leaves are still found on the forest path, which is covered by a thin layer of snow. Minor disruptions repeatedly interfere with one’s romantic expectations; at first they are a source of irritation, which one then soon starts to anticipate: a fence, a branch, a piece of abandoned cloth. Once one has gained a sense of the series, everything seems as if it could be likened to the staffage figures of the painter Josef Anton Koch, to whom El Dib owes as much in terms of his choice of motif and coloration as he does to the photographer Heinrich Riebesehl, whose agrarian landscapes established the iconological theme of this genre. However, what prevents El Dib from an overly close association with the historical period of so-called Autorenphotographie (a German term of the 1970s taken from film d’auteur) is his use of color, one of his many artistic devices that he reveals, not only over the course of the afternoon. The colors of his images do not correspond to the red-green-blue of his analog camera technology and digital image processing or the red-yellow-blue of the classical modernism from his architectural training but the vividly enhanced greens of the palette of someone like Ewald Hering, whose impact on art through his psychophysics has not yet been sufficiently investigated. 

The landscapes appear to be an erratic element in the artist’s oeuvre, not only due to their color. However, upon closer examination this applies to all his series, and it constitutes the appeal but also the difficulty of a book presentation or retrospective of his work, which in Austria is most fittingly called a Personale. If one is looking for transitions between El Dib’s individual groups of works, one should not try to search them out; with time they surface practically on their own. Among the images of the series Walking the Dog, the artist most prefers those showing the largest expanses with the smallest grained surfaces, that is, where the surface of what is depicted merges with the surface of the image itself. This same coincidence of surface and texture is also frequently found in his staged portraits. But in these images one is often so fascinated by the people and the way they are portrayed, that one hardly notices the texture – and one has thus missed something important about these images. 

The choice between color and black and white plays an additional role for El Dib and acts as a separator or link between individual series. Everything grey refers to the hand-made, the analog, the often painstakingly self-produced elements of his oeuvre. Color is a technical procedure, which passes on to someone else. But the parameters of size, darkness, and contrast, which he must communicate in this case, play an even greater role than in the do-it-yourself process in the photo lab. He thus repeats a process in photography that is familiar to him from modern architecture. With the decrease in the amount of draftsmanship involved in design, comes the (ever) increasing need for coordinating communication. A greater division of labor enters into the process of building, as into this process of image making. In the visual arts the division of labor is a well-known phenomenon, especially with regard to producing color. No artist of the 16th or 17th century could afford to paint without a skilled assistant mixing colors.

In contrast to other series, Walking the Dog illustrates this clearly by making the working process transparent. Also, as a series it ultimately has greater significance: El Dib veritably happens upon a parameter of photography that he believes has not yet been sufficiently addressed, although this is initially not clear to him, and then he gradually works his way to this understanding. While taking walks with the dog he sees segments of landscapes that seem worthy of a photograph, but he hesitates before going ahead. It has been seen all too often, all too picturesque as a motif, all too overused as a subject matter. And already he finds himself at the heart of the dilemma of medial image making, for he is searching for remnants of the authentic, guarantees of autonomy, possibilities of composition only at his disposal. But not through a thoughtful discussion as to what constitutes the making of an image – this has already been undertaken by El Dib’s predecessors, who were faced with the task of legitimizing photography as art. These include Otto Steinert with his absolute ambition to make art history and photographers such as Heinz Hajek-Halke, whose abstract works emerged within the sphere of influence of art informel. Both were absolutely influential in regard to many elements of El Dib’s earlier works. Meanwhile, El Dib discovers his form of the photographic gaze in a manner of passing, in taking up lost threads once again, in the pleasure of capturing what he sees. And, this approach represents the inversion of his working process in his first two series, Bilder von Menschen und Tieren (Images of People and Animals) as well as the Inszenierte Bildnisse (Staged Portraits).  

It is easier to speak about the works of other artists than about one’s own, and thus we find ourselves in an extended discussion about the wonderful, fanciful drawings and perfectly chased enamels by Astrid Köppe; of course all within the great white space of a hip gallery in an even hipper gallery neighborhood in Berlin. In conversation, gestures are more important than words, and the way El Dib shrugs his shoulders or turns when looking at a piece says more about his relationship to the respective work than a long discussion. His visual curiosity is revealed more in (the corners of) his eyes than in an expectant pose or gait, and a gentle “oh” quickly substitutes the longer explanation, which tends to be disruptive when one is confronted with an original work of art. El Dib can expect, if not command, a similar unconditional contemplation of his work. This makes the response of those seeing his work for the first time all the more astounding: a sense of distress, or at least a kind of surprise that could be described as sub-surreal. 

The first two series of his oeuvre, the Bilder von Menschen und Tieren (Images of People and Animals) and the Inszenierte Bildnisse (Staged Portraits) employed this very sense of surprise. Highly sensitive to interpersonal and human-animal situations, El Dib visualized moments in which such situations verged simultaneously on comedy and tragedy, pathos and empathy. The protagonists themselves, the first to see the images, were often unaware of their personal situation. Both series – already integrally linked throughout extensive phases of their production and reception and only discernable from one another in retrospect – share a stringent framing. Each image is a square, always havig a black edge all around as evidence of full-format enlargement. To this extent the series might seem to recall the bygone practices of so-called Autorenphotographie and its ideological origins, and thus the series seem a little outdated, but the artist does not contest this. This quiet, stringent cropping of the image ensures him the heightened attention of the viewer. What is important takes place within the square and has no intentions of going any further. 

As in the early fresco painting in the circle of Giotto, the content of the image is presented as a kind of display case similar to a house or a theater opened at the front to afford a better view. This reveals people in situations considered unusual and important by the photographer. As a stand-in for the viewer, the camera is almost always the focus of the direct gaze of the people and animals, and actually of things too. Everything looks out from inside the box, and the viewer is suddenly startled: The protagonists and the photographer turn one into a voyeur, whether one so desires or not. However, the world that one looks into is diminutively private, and each image is reduced to the scale of a puppet theatre. This makes viewing the work not only tolerable but also human and enjoyable as a process of getting visually (too) close to someone. 

An important element in the staging of the works is light, as it is the primary sculptural medium for artists working in photography. El Dib rarely uses light overtly, but more as an occasional aesthetic quotation of a long bygone form of studio photography. He usually employs it by alternating between the existing daylight or lamp light and a sparingly used source of artificial illumination. What appears astoundingly constant within his approach to lighting is the relatively flat, even rendering of the faces. It stands to reason that the artist forgoes the words “Porträt,” or “portrait,” at least in the German titles of the series, for in his work the head of his protagonist always suggests a relationship to the entire body, even when the latter is not part of the composition. Also the relationship of the individual to their animal is a physical one, and for many viewers this immediately suggests a battery of psychoanalytical connotations. But this interests the artistic the least. Instead, the images reflect the expectations – more easily described in terms Derrida than Freud – that potential viewers bring to the images and that are reflected in the staging of the image. As with art in general, many questions remain unanswered in these series in particular and their images. 

The drive through the Tiergarten Tunnel from the central train station to Potsdamer Platz gives rise to a conversation about the routing of traffic in Berlin and the strange fact that in this city underground routes are almost solely reserved for trains, not cars, bicycles, and pedestrians. El Dib recapitulates aspects of his training in urban planning during his architecture studies, most of all the faulty assessments of future developments in traffic flow and population growth. The curve around the museums of the Kulturforum on Potsdamer Platz is taken with bemusement, since this complex has lost its significance as a monumentally peripheral site. However, despite all the efforts to the contrary, a new center has not emerged here. The question as to the early Berlin influences on his work thus answers itself: they are part of a history, just like the city itself, whose current make-up amuses and interests him but has no further significance for his work. 

This is evident in a comprehensive series, which El Dib began in the late 1990s, and which functions as a link between his earlier visually evocative works and later, primarily media-critical works: the SchnittBlumenBilder (CutFlowerImages). On the one hand, they still have a square format and in almost all cases a simple composition – a table in front of a white wall by a window – and thus also a simple, easily understood light source. However, the black borders have disappeared, and the composition of the image no longer necessarily follows the rules governing the highlighting dictated by the staggered depth of central perspective. But these are still black and white and grey, excellently articulated single images, that is, vintage prints. The title of the series says it all. The works depict cut flowers, especially tulips, not only important plants in an erotic sense, but particularly symbolic of the connection between Europe and the Orient. Although not an Egyptian, Suleiman the Magnificent was indeed a Renaissance ruler with an attitude as equally global as his Habsburg counterparts, who believed that the sun would never set on their empire. Nonetheless, they were not able to cultivate tulips. 

The SchnittBlumenBilder series not only draws on historical elements of the discourse on flowers but also has deep roots in the history of photography. El Dib must have had two divergent strains of more recent photographic history in mind: the highly erotic flower pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe, already sick with AIDS, and the rediscovery of the plant photographs of Karl Blossfeldt, which stirred debates about teaching materials, modern construction, and the use of drugs. El Dib situates himself between these two poles so carefully that it is impossible determine his own position. Also, this is the last time in his own oeuvre that he addresses the historically implied role of photography as a mediation of truth. He does so not only to affirm that faith in this mediation is almost senseless but also to establish his own position: an autonomous artist making use of an existing technology and all its levels of meaning. He practices photography in the sense of a material aesthetic, as Thomas Raff has described antique sculptors and the casting possibilities afforded by bronze. In comparison, the iconography of flower images has a very long history of its own; it spans from the Dutch painting of the 17th century to the works of Josef Sudek and Nobuyoshi Araki. Precisely the fact there were so many precedents describes the uniqueness of this series within El Dib’s oeuvre. He worked on it for a long time until something emerged that he had not seen before, and we follow the development of his gaze. 

In the garden of the coffee house sit well-dressed people with well-behaved children, most of them sleeping in complicated push-vehicles that could hardly be called baby carriages anymore. At the other tables have gathered the typical clientele of a hot afternoon: older gentlemen with neck scarves and straw hats, young gentlemen wearing hair gel and light-colored suits, ladies of all ages, alone and in small groups. The food excellent, the beverages at this time of day still largely alcohol free, and hanging over everything a slightly morbid feeling of being fallen out of time, a little more stolid than in Vienna, much calmer than in Moscow, but also more sedate than in Paris or Aix-en-Provence. The question arises: What comes after the coffee houses? Or looking into the nearer future: At what point will it be necessary to turn idylls such as these into gated communities, à la Latin America? A good place to launch into a critique of media, especially in conversation with El Dib. The elements that he brings into his own works as props are constructive, even if they do not always appear constructivistic. They are namely parameters, abstract settings of technical processes, whose traditional canonical automatism are disrupted by their aesthetic consequences. 

All the series in El Dib’s extensive oeuvre are accompanied by smaller groups of works orbiting around the manner of production of each major complex. Leben vor dem Tod (Life Before Death) is an extensive exploration of the theater as a concept of the world, naturally based on a real theatrical production, the content of which is insignificant in relation to the images. However, the movement on the stage as a paradigm of what must be photographed in order to create an evocative image of the theater – this movement takes on a life of its own in a wild stir of light and shadow with frayed edges and almost without any consistency of form. Here possibly an arm, there a foot, here a prop, in the back a second actor – the only recognizable constants are hands, less often feet and necks. The black and white of the images form a hard contrast, and to the viewer there hardly seems to be any grey. Initially the images seem to suggest a resurrection a 1960s aesthetic of the theater photography of Helmut Lander and Pit Ludwig. But then one soon realizes that the work of El Dib is founded on something original: a radical opposite of the serene world evoked by his portraits. 

Developed parallel to the series of cut flowers, the two series Men At Work and United Tongues draw on and distill the complex of erotic obsessions manifested in the portraits and subsequent works, and the series also open up a new avenue in El Dib’s oeuvre. Images reproduced from porno magazines are cropped down to male faces or French kisses and presented as negative prints, which are erratically arranged on the white page of the background, almost an apparent reflection of their location on the magazine page. The element of reproduction is made highly evident by the rough printing dots, and once one has overcome the abstraction created by the negative image, the stereotypes begin to take effect. The mustache is a demonstration of a kind of stale masculinity typical of the métier as a whole, and the kisses represent a formalization of the equality of the sex organs to the point that all obsession dissipates. Here too, there were preceding sources of inspiration for the production of these works, for example Timm Ulrichs’ enlargement of works of art in the background of porno photographs. However, within El Dib’s oeuvre these two small series – which together with the very complex and almost irreproducible printing process of Ordnung der Steine (Disposition of the Rocks) and Helene auf Tilos (Helene on Tilos) – serve the important function of lending clarity to his own artistic process and results, which are certainly a source of satisfaction in every sense of the word. 

After many attempts and certainly a critical period of experimentation, El Dib managed in Weekenders to create the most radical deconstruction of his own work up to that point. This also signaled the end of his working with analog, self-produced prints based on black and white photography. He tears and crumples, smooths out, and finally reproduces his test prints, and later entire images from earlier series – all is his typically precise and outstanding craftsmanship. One must spend a long time with these works to recognize the inherent critique of everything the artist had deemed important up to that point: clarity in depicting the real, an overt articulation of physical-chemical process, and even the interpretability of the initial communicative-emotional situation of the photographic act. El Dib thus concludes an entire phase of his artistic development. Meaning emerges in the process of visual production and not in the search for existing images that are reused and photographed. After Weekenders – a harmless title seeming to refer to photography as a pastime while also countering previous elements of erotic obsession and thus severing the connection between the image and its content in the artist’s oeuvre – nothing else than a radical new beginning was possible, as indicated by the color images from the series Walking The Dog.

El Dib brings his guest to the train station by car and insists on getting as close as possible to the doors of the glass cube at the entrance. The questions discussed that afternoon are revisited in the process: What did we see together? Where does the artist Amin El Dib stand in relation to this? What is going to be his next project? How does he plan to add the final touches to existing series of works? Naturally, both participants in the conversation know that there is no answer to these questions, but El Dib would at least like to approximate some kind of preliminary statement, at least as an agenda for the next conversation. 

Amin El Dib is an artist with a fervid interest in the final product; he makes images. Each one stands on its own, regardless whether it was created in the context a series; each represents El Dib as an artist and the work as part of an oeuvre. Classical rules of composition have as much significance in the development of the images as do technical photographic processes. His insistence on remaining an image-maker frees the artist El Dib from the tiresome questions as to the source of his ideas for images. They are simply present, just like the images themselves. Each must be decoded individually, a wonderful and rewarding process – for the viewer. The manner in which this decoding takes place has changed over the course of the artist’s development and that of his work, somewhat like the path indicated in some of the images from the series Walking The Dog: nothing is as it appears, and one remains long unsure as to what one actually sees. How wonderful for El Dib. He can, he must, he wishes to continue for a good long while, so that we, the viewers, can follow the path he takes.

Rolf Sachsse, 2011