»A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat itself to us inexorably.«1
»Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being. (…) They serve no social purpose.«2
When the sun mercilessly stabs from the sky, he sets up his camera on a tripod on the balcony. That way he needn’t leave the house. How practical! Claus Stolz, born in Mannheim in 1963, does precisely what no other photographer in the world would do with his camera. He points the lens at the sun and chooses the setting for soft focus. Then he opens the shutter for minutes at a time. The rays collect without reflection, expanding to a width of a few millimeters – into a solar ball on celluloid. Suddenly the film burns in the camera and smoke rises. A film sun is born.
If he had to look long through the viewfinder, the focused rays would burn out his retina. Sunburn in the pupil – a horror for us visually-oriented people. But Claus Stolz doesn’t look through the viewfinder for long. He lets the apparatus do the work. The rest – composing with color and form, even the procedure of exposing – is left to the ordinary film material. The man from Mannheim (Germany) collects sunburns – a collection that has grown over the years and is unique in the world.
On a bright working day, he opens the aperture wide. He avoids a sharp focus by intentionally blurring. All too precise a focus would be as useless as a laser beam; it would only burn holes in the film. But he wants to shape regular figures, objects, and universes with the focus – worlds whose beauty he wants to wrest from the burning work of destruction.
As is well known, when one focuses, light is bundled on the film in the camera. Here it swelters and burns. Claus Stolz has ruined more than one camera this way. And he has discovered something strange thereby: Kodak film burns yellower than Fuji. Agfa produces blue tones. Slide film burns differently from negative film.
Agfa black-and-white slide film generates sublimely fine grey tones with gold nuances. Ilford tends toward brown. Only cheap film is useless for destruction. This is a broad field for experimentation, upon which Claus Stolz has left his brand for the last 12 years. Depending on the position of the sun, the burning proceeds vertically (midday) or diagonally, rising in the morning and slightly falling in the afternoon. The course and angle of the destroying exposure allow the viewer to recognize its duration and time of day. Sometimes the process of burning is dulled or interrupted by clouds. For example, as we read in connection with Sun # 80.
»I use a robust medium format camera. For short exposures of up to 5 minutes, I point the camera so that the sun strikes directly in the middle of the focusing screen. If exposures are planned for a longer period, then the orientation and start of exposure are at the left-hand margin of the picture or at the upper corner of the picture – in this way, the sun can wander across the surface of the film for a maximum of about an hour.«
Claus Stolz burns up just about any kind of roll film: slide film, infrared film, negative film, black-and-white film. Like an alchemist turning dross into gold, he sometimes uses very old film rolls bought on auction for a few cents on the Internet. Assisting the central heavenly body of our solar system, they thereby create a wondrous palette of colors and diversity of forms that identify the artist. But the real creator is the sun. Their aesthetic gives the »magician« Stolz a boost, so to speak – of course in cooperation with solar energy. This photo art form, as regenerative as it is environmentally friendly, is thus unquestionably »extraterrestrial«.
With his very direct photos, Claus Stolz unquestionably suspends every reflection of the sun’s light. He thereby fundamentally undermines the depicting character of all seeing. The driving force behind all earthly matter – the sun – is not directly visible to human or animal. Perception has its blind spot. What people see of the world is generally reflected light. In Platon’s myth of the cave, we see in the depiction only a reflection of things, not the things themselves or their essence. But the depiction is a foundation of our ordering of things, which Michel Foucault says organizes the »figures of know-ledge«.3 Even Antiquity drew its epistemology from optics: »Every efficient cause acts through its own power, which it exercises on the adjacent matter, as the light (lux)
of the sun exercises its power on the air (which power is light (lumen) diffused through the whole world from the solar light (lux)). And this power is called ›likeness‹, ›image‹, and ›species‹ and is designated by many other names, and it is produced both by substance and by accident, spiritual and corporeal. (…) And this species produces every action in the world, for it acts on sense, on the intellect, and on all matter of the world for the generation of things.«4
»I often develop the exposed films myself, because, unlike with machine processing, this permits a procedure that is not hard on the material, especially because many kinds of film cannot be developed in a laboratory without problems. But for various reasons (the emulsion is too thin, the film rolls up too much, etc.), some kinds of film prove to be unsuitable for my purposes.«
Different methods of developing the film material result in extremely different results. So developing plays a much greater role here than in conventional photography. And, depending on how the film dries, the softened and drying layers of film produce bizarre pictorial worlds in the burned parts. Sun # 100 is wondrously graced with an array of what seem like parachutes overlapping at the margins. These suddenly seem spatial and transparent. Such a Sun shines like a shot into a white void.
»After almost every exposure, I briefly open the magazine to get an impression of the effect and intensity of the rays. This does not destroy the exposure. The film, after all, is extremely overexposed anyway. In this way, I can accordingly expose the film again, if needed. Or, as is almost always necessary, I can take whole series of exposures. After all, I can’t measure the intensity of the sun’s rays. A conventional light meter would not do it, of course. Physicists can measure the intensity of sunlight using pyranometers. But the measured intensity would not reveal much about how the film reacts in an individual case.«
Photographic art depends on the weather, conditions in the atmosphere, and the amount of radiation absorbed by particulate matter. Atmospheric dust thus crucially influences how much light reaches the camera. A lot of energy is required to melt the film. Only with sufficient solar energy do whole areas of the celluloid burn if the camera is
not sharply focused. And too much dust greatly slows the process.
With so many spontaneous factors, control is important. Sometimes Claus Stolz simply tapes a strip of film to the open rear wall of the camera without a magazine. This allows him, in real time during the exposure, to see how the solar network slowly grows on the film and to stop the destructive exposure spontaneously. »I then expose and develop ›by hand‹ short strips without a magazine and without winding – it entails a lot of fiddling around.«
Precision work is needed to get something more than a black hole or a line. For instance, Sun # 69 was created by intent – by winding the film forward. Crumbs melt here in beauty. If the camera is sharply focused – set to infinity – the instant image of the sun is a bounded circle that is lengthened if the exposure is longer. An exposure of up to about 30 seconds forms a circle; after that, the result is oval and lengthy. The maximum exposure time for a roll, from one end of the magazine to the other, is about 60 minutes.
»If I set the camera so that it is unfocused, the circle or stripe – and with it the surface of the image – grows notably. At the same time, the radiation is decreased or spread over the larger surface, making it weaker per unit of area. Minimal changes in the intensity of focus permit very fine dosages of light. The ›ray gun‹ throttled in controlled fashion by lack of focus in the lens thereby permits ideal sunburns.«
On the film itself, this is usually a matter of only millimeters. But the prints are oversized. Many of the originals are courageous, one-of-a-kind, and overwhelm the viewer with their 120 x 120 cm dimensions. The fine scan files sometimes have one gigabyte or more each. Such large amounts of data offer ultimate resolution – as a kind of visual adventure in unknown worlds. Here interpretation is liberated.
Magnifying glass images are seen for the first time in beautiful weirdness. They pose more riddles than they solve. Some look like the births of stars. See and stare in awe.
Color films are generally constructed in several layers, so that Claus Stolz can create variations across the entire spectrum, from minimal damage with a few bubbles, as in Sun # 7, to complete burning out, as in Sun # 23. »Here it smolders and smokes right out of the camera – not to mention the smell…«
Suddenly these sun rays form structures. The best Suns always confuse the viewer – shimmeringly oscillating between microscope and telescope: first one associates a microcosm, then one is certain the image is of the macrocosm of a universe, eons away. Neither is true.
In 1757 in London, Edmund Burke, a pioneer of empirical aesthetics, wrote: »Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime.«5 He already knew all too well the »other« source of his study of sublimity. According to Burke, »the last extreme of littleness« is, aesthetically, as sublime »as the great extreme of dimension«: »We become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme of littleness from the vast itself.«6
As a heliocentrist and a zealous champion of sensualism and the teachings of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) at the beginning of the modern age, Burke had long known of the special importance of the physics of the sun in the universe: »Mere light is too common a thing to make a strong impression on the mind, and without a strong impression nothing can be sublime. But such a light as that of the sun, immediately exerted on the eye, as it overpowers the sense, is a very great idea. (…) A quick transition from light to darkness, or from darkness to light, has yet a greater effect.«7 In Sun # 7 and Sun # 84, an aura is barely visible around the burned bubble. Here we see a similarity to the »halo phenomena« known from optics. An appearance like Saturn and its rings. In Sun # 11, Sun # 23, Sun # 27, and Sun # 40, we see the negative, without any transformation into a positive image. Here the original state was preserved and the negative not reversed, as is usual.
These can be compared with the legendary photograms of Stolz’s Scottish predecessor Garry Fabian Miller, with their color studies that also vary the themes of sun and moon in rare, unique items – as a pure form of abstraction
and reduction. Like Miller in Exposure (2005) and in Year One (2007),8 Stolz finds in Sunburns (2008) a radical form language – but with the burns and destructive power of the sun. Outstanding art makes our seeing essential. As just pinned down in comparison with Garry Fabian Miller, Claus Stolz’s photo art reveals itself as radical recourse to the critical impetus of abstract and concrete painting with their self-referentiality that strives for autarchy and hermeticism:
»To say ›the work of art is self-analytic‹ is (…) to say that it consists in the crises it goes through, that it is punctuated by moments of breakthrough or ›revelation,‹ which require that one questions one’s conception of who one is or how one has invested oneself in it.«9
For Stolz, forms can be spatially depicted, which is particularly interesting. Around the burned parts, as far as the margins, some Suns display an extremely fascinating indeterminate flow of color. In these works, finely-structured, sharply focused areas in the picture then shade into vague zones of blurring. This can seem very enigmatic, especially because here we cannot speak of a classical pictorial depth with a visual axis from the foreground to the background and a defined depth of focus.
What makes an artist an artist? Above all, how he deals with his medium. The photography theorist Villem Flusser once called this »outwitting the apparatus«. The artist outwits the camera’s documenting and registering function only by means of individual strategies that lead to an aesthetic and conceptual gain. A gain that affirmative photography can never display, no matter how well it can capture nature in imitation.
One possibility for outwitting the apparatus is to turn and reverse conventions of picture production against the device, in order to arrive at new, previously unseen images. Claus Stolz provides an example of this position. He has created pictures that are exposed, against every rule, not with the sun, but against it. With a wide-open aperture, the pure light no longer draws seeming depictions of reality on the light-sensitive material, but burns pictures into it.
Sometimes the intense light attacks the sensitive film material radically to a point beyond recognizability. This unrecognizability is what first creates »primal images«, which are here brought together for the first time as a »sun collection« with 25 picture panels. We see photons destroying in beauty. Pictures in which the act of destruction shows itself in radiant beauty, posing visual riddles to our eyes. In their abstract concretion, these riddles no longer have referents in reality. Precisely that challenges our imagination to the utmost.
In the work, deconstruction takes a creative role. On the way to a finished sun picture, infinitely many variable factors play a role. This gives Claus Stolz scope for enormous variance. Over the years, this artist-researcher has composed and presented an entire poesy of the sun, out of the book of nature. The »photosoph« is coming. His gaze into the light is essential.
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, New York 1958, 2nd edition, I:115, p. 48e.
2 E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel, quoted after W.J.T Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago and London 1994, p. 35.
3 Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge, Frankfurt 1974, p. 46.
4 Roger Bacon, Perspectiva, quoted after David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago 1976, p. 113.
5 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, edited with an introduction and notes by J. T. Boulton, London 1958, Part II, p. 72
6 Ibid., Part II, p. 72.
7 Ibid., Part II, p. 80.
8 Garry Fabian Miller, Exposure, Naming the Lights, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 2005, Foreword by Ian Warrell, pp. 8–19; Garry Fabian Miller, Year One, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 2007, Foreword by Edmund de Waal, pp. 3–5.
9 John Rajchman, in: Foreword to Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, Minneapolis 1991, pp. XVI.