Thomas Wunsch, "What you see is what you get" Gallery Studio_01, Wiesbaden, Germany
Mate Haupt
During our lifetime we spend many years traveling. In fact, we travel more time than ever before in history due to the opportunities that modern mobility offers us. We pass public spaces and we encounter everyday things as we do so. Most of the time we tend not to notice them. People, trains, trees, shop windows, pathways, to name just a few examples. These are details we often pay no attention to. But German photographer Thomas Wunsch does. It is the inconspicuous detail he turns his attention to: an ashtray at a train station, the pattern on a rusty barrel, the texture of wet pavement or reflections in a window. This is what Thomas Wunsch highlights in his photographs. And he gives them a special aura.
But there is more. Thomas Wunsch makes time visible in his pictures. Time is very valuable; it is our most valuable asset. We try to hang on to moments in time but one moment is quickly gone and the next one arrives. Time is not visible, untouchable. Time is abstract. Thomas Wunsch is searching for the time and catches it, but he does not freeze it by giving it permanence. The photographer expands time in space, taking his time. In each of his photographs we see several moments at once, like consecutive frames of a movie fading into each other. He uses long exposure times and physical movement to achieve his goal.
In his pictures, spaces lose their outlines and seem to disappear. It is the in-between-spaces that Thomas Wunsch wants to fill out. Shot on slide film, each photograph is scanned and subject to extensive alterations in Photoshop. Thomas Wunsch uses the tools that digital processing offers today like painters use paint, a brush and easel. To him, a slide is only the source material. His photographs show many different subjects and by making those subjects abstract–sometimes beyond recognition–he gives them a very special aesthetic value. It is in these pictures that we encounter a Kafka-esque symbolism. And a very different kind of emotion.
We can get a sense of time-space, movement, security (or lack of it) and loneliness. Thomas Wunsch freezes fleeting moments. They are coincidental, not staged. The coincidence is part of his pictures. He is giving rise to the myth of the ordinary. He is also a gentle and discrete observer, authentic, yet never voyeuristic. He is also an aesthete. His personal view, his love for attention to detail and the special processing make his photographs very distinctive.
Thomas Wunsch is very apt at playing with our sensory perception. Our eyes are stimulated by light, but an image is formed by a human brain. The brain adds information to the incoming visual signals; imagination creates our view of the world. Therefore: "What you see is what you get." Depending on our feelings, emotions, perception and experience. It is like listening to music: some people feel nothing and only hear the sound of a song, while it sends shivers down the spine of others. It all depends on one’s personal view. And since his images are open to interpretation, Thomas Wunsch gives the viewer more than just a fixed view of the world. The viewer becomes part of his world. "What you see is what you get" is the title of the show, but it is also the photographer’s concept.
The exhibition at the renowned gallery Studio_01 shows his pictures grouped together to add yet another dimension. They look like mind maps, telling a story all on their own. One is reminded of short stories or novels, or fragments of memory, whose parts are put together like a puzzle. Within those groups of pictures each individual photograph still displays its own charm. All of the photographs are black and white, sometimes displaying very fine shades of grey, sometimes very strong contrasts. Color photographs in general and color patterns in particular are much easier to make because of the added dimension and have therefore never been the artist’s interest. The photographs are 12 x 12 centimeters in size, like CD covers. Thomas Wunsch prefers the square format, because it is more democratic. In rectangular pictures, he says, the larger dimension always outweighs the smaller.
Looking at those photographs is a very intimate experience for the viewer, because the images stick to the mind. Thomas Wunsch is not a romantic, but his photographs display something very magic and mysterious and they have a very rhythmic quality. Thus, it is not surprising that the German record label ECM publishes his photographs. Two CDs with his pictures on the cover were nominated for Grammy Awards this year.
