Photography can often be described as a 2D representation of real-world objects. Traditionally, we have viewed photographs as prints on paper, while increasingly images are being consumed electronically, either through apps like Instagram or even through this blog. A friend of mine, in his artist talk, recently questioned whether or not photographs need be printed at all? In the midst of these questions about our current relationship to the photographic image, and in the frenzy of “Berlin Art Week”, I had the opportunity to view a group exhibition entitled Augmented Dreams.
According to the show’s own write-up, “The term augmented dream is the de- scription of a paradigm change. It describes a new conditio humana in which the digital world will become a more significant reference point for the construction of personal reality than the physical world.”
Enter Michel Lamoller.
It was in this show, Augmented Dreams, that I first encountered Lamoller’s work in person. In his cut-photo and installations, Lamoller manages to toe the line beautifully between the depths and non-depths of digital reality and the physicality of everyday tangible forms. In the image below taken from his landscape series, the tiled structures of an underground subway are stripped away, byte for byte, translating real spaces into a pixelated forms. These layers of visual information locked away in the physicality of a known structure are revealed through these images.
Pixels allow for easy image manipulation, and this revelation of inner spaces not only offers the keys to discovering new levels of meaning in a mundane architecture, but presents the viewer with a flexibility of experience in how we navigate the space and in how we may alter our own experience of it.
In his video portrait, Lamoller describes his frustration with the reproductive nature of the medium of photography, but ironically, he ends up using exactly this aspect in the creation of his work. He produces multiple identical prints, using usually between 10 and 15, to ultimately unearth one original, and considerably lessreplicable, work. His process is painstaking, and his technique is visibly mature, and this creates a seamlessness which allows the viewer to interact with the hyperdimensional spaces Lamoller creates.
