Matthias Koch
Matthias Koch is an artist and photographer originally from Germany. He lived and worked in Chile, Venezuela, Mexico and France and currently established his basecamp in the South of France. His work is based on intimate questions related to absence, memory and survival. Through a documentary approach, he seeks to explore the fragile and shifting boundaries between past and present, the visible and the invisible. “Matthias Koch’s photographs have a great strength, an intensity of monstration that cannot leave indifferent to our time and to the world, they cause uneasiness and a diffuse anguish from which one cannot escape because it is indeed reality that is at stake, stripped of all fiction.” Claude Molzino, Philosopher
Diffraction, a law of optics
All these photographs present fragments – Stücke, pieces, bits – of the world, ours. These images were picked from all corners of the world, but that doesn’t matter here; the contexts and origins are multiple, the diversity of continents and cultures say the great traveler that is the photographer, and yet any exotic and simply anecdotal particularity is erased, not denied, but surpassed, raised by the vision which carries all these photographs and illuminates them or more precisely, brings them to life with the singular clarity that characterizes it.
For such is the law of diffraction that there must be a single light at the starting point of this bursting into pieces of reality captured by the lens; dismemberment requires a base of unity and it is therefore this whose identity it is up to us to question. It is indeed a question of identity that is at stake in these shots, not that of the photographer, but that of the world he intends to show. At the same time as this fragmentation of reality, the photographer gives us his own vision by which we can grasp all these visual bursts like so many samples of the contemporary world in its increasingly homogeneous planetary lack of differentiation which makes it irrelevant to know whether the photograph was taken in Amsterdam or in Hong-Kong, if one is in Athens, in Caracas or Seine-et-Marne; it is precisely this isotropic and isomorphic space of leveling, crushing modernity, crushed under the reign of technique and calculation as the only ontological standards that must be faced.
Preface by Claude Molzino
Diffraction, a law of optics
All these photographs present fragments – Stücke, pieces, bits – of the world, ours. These images were picked from all corners of the world, but that doesn’t matter here; the contexts and origins are multiple, the diversity of continents and cultures say the great traveler that is the photographer, and yet any exotic and simply anecdotal particularity is erased, not denied, but surpassed, raised by the vision which carries all these photographs and illuminates them or more precisely, brings them to life with the singular clarity that characterizes it.
For such is the law of diffraction that there must be a single light at the starting point of this bursting into pieces of reality captured by the lens; dismemberment requires a base of unity and it is therefore this whose identity it is up to us to question. It is indeed a question of identity that is at stake in these shots, not that of the photographer, but that of the world he intends to show. At the same time as this fragmentation of reality, the photographer gives us his own vision by which we can grasp all these visual bursts like so many samples of the contemporary world in its increasingly homogeneous planetary lack of differentiation which makes it irrelevant to know whether the photograph was taken in Amsterdam or in Hong-Kong, if one is in Athens, in Caracas or Seine-et-Marne; it is precisely this isotropic and isomorphic space of leveling, crushing modernity, crushed under the reign of technique and calculation as the only ontological standards that must be faced.
Preface by Claude Molzino
Diffraction, a law of optics
All these photographs present fragments – Stücke, pieces, bits – of the world, ours. These images were picked from all corners of the world, but that doesn’t matter here; the contexts and origins are multiple, the diversity of continents and cultures say the great traveler that is the photographer, and yet any exotic and simply anecdotal particularity is erased, not denied, but surpassed, raised by the vision which carries all these photographs and illuminates them or more precisely, brings them to life with the singular clarity that characterizes it.
For such is the law of diffraction that there must be a single light at the starting point of this bursting into pieces of reality captured by the lens; dismemberment requires a base of unity and it is therefore this whose identity it is up to us to question. It is indeed a question of identity that is at stake in these shots, not that of the photographer, but that of the world he intends to show. At the same time as this fragmentation of reality, the photographer gives us his own vision by which we can grasp all these visual bursts like so many samples of the contemporary world in its increasingly homogeneous planetary lack of differentiation which makes it irrelevant to know whether the photograph was taken in Amsterdam or in Hong-Kong, if one is in Athens, in Caracas or Seine-et-Marne; it is precisely this isotropic and isomorphic space of leveling, crushing modernity, crushed under the reign of technique and calculation as the only ontological standards that must be faced.
Preface by Claude Molzino