The photographic works of Claus Stolz exemplifies the precarious relationship between man and nature and vice versa, as well as his relationship to himself including his mechanisms of perception, but void of didactic lesson.
In his "ground photos", nothing is pre-arranged. The angle of vision is directed exactly vertically from above at a fixed, comparatively small distance on, for example, a patch of meadow, a piece of forest soil, an expanse of fallow land, snow or water. A reduced perspective, no vanishing lines or horizons; no shadow effect influences or guides the eye; the illumination is monotonously diffuse, the shooting technique thus standardized to a large degree. The subjects (colonized between the "dog walks" in our urban centers and our cultural landscapes) are of indiscriminate interest to the artist; details, even if they appear coincidental or arbitrary, chosen in such a universal manner that they have archetypal character.
Photographed and enlarged on a scale of 4:1 compared to the original surfaces, the photographs add to a store of pictures everyone believes to recognize; pictures which do not make, nor indeed intend to make, any (direct) statement about the world and its inhabitants. The nearness achieved by the photographs simultaneously accentuates a distance as great as can be. Free of any romantic aspects of nature, seeming, much to our confusion, like views of a strange world, in a way similar to the pictures from Mars sent to us by the Pathfinder probe, the pictures of Claus Stolz turn into a record of a pursuit of tracks, of a careful exploration. They are „souvenirs" of a world the wonders of which we marvel at without necessarily needing to understand them.
These photographs are stating that something is (there). Strangely enough, it is exactly this unapproachability and laconic presence that creates a provocative confusion, which is heightened even more by the calm beauty of the pictures as well as by the objectswhich may be found on one or the other of the soil photographs. Be these objects cigarette butts, fragments of glass, drift wood and other washed-up objects, plastic, tin foil, paper or a lost child's eyeglass case. Each place is a place where something could have occurred.
Perception is confronted with vision by Claus Stolz: series such as Himmel (sky) or Dämmerung (twilight) show continuous monochrome expanses, and nothing of the modulation of shades that the eye, or rather the brain and the memory, imagination and recollection, usually associate with these terms.
The blue, red, yellow, green, violet, pink or grey of a form an impenetrable surface and thus forbids any kind of deeper view, except for the one inherent in colour, there is no correctness of scale, no point of reference, no pretence of spatiality. Here too we find the most consistent illumination, a supposed artificiality separating the visual process from the habitual experience of reality. This amazingly broad and partly also very strong pallet of colours may surprise at first. But together with the artist's excerpts from "normal" day- and night-sky photographs, sunrises and sunsets, he also uses the sky colours of illustrations taken from various printed materials such as travel brochures, picture volumes or reproductions of paintings; the falsified colour impressions when looking through sunglasses; the changed colours in old photographs and films, or the strange colours of a night sky illuminated by lightning.
Depending on the intensity of radiation and the reaction time with the photographic material (or on the distance covered during the exposure time due to the rotation of the earth) and utterly burnt into it, long-time exposure series of the sun result in circular to long stretched-out forms enclosing bluish-black or dark brown, strange and sometimes bizarre looking shapes and structures. Everyone is familiar with this optical effect: after looking at the sun with unprotected eyes, even for a short time, a light spot is reproduced on the retina; easily inflammable materials may be ignited in the focal point of a burning glass. Owing to the lens system and given the appropriate exposure times, the effect on the film material inside the camera is much the same. There is no digital processing following.
In his work, Claus Stolz returns from a reproduction to the actual picture which in its detachment from reality exists in its own right. By treating the camera and the photographic process not as manipulable aids, but as equals to the eye of the photographer, the view changes and gains distance through its proximity to the subject. The objective of this type of photography is photography.
Martin Stather, from: Ins Grüne. Fotografische Arbeiten von Claus Stolz / Into The Greenery. Photographic Works by Claus Stolz, catalog, ed. by Martin Stather, Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheim 2000