Erik Steinbrecher : karawane

“Hardly anything in the world today exists in greater abundance than photographs,” Andreas Baur and Ludwig Seyfarth, the curators of Esslingen’s 6th International Photo-Triennale, point out. Bringing together works by sixteen artists (including Erik Steinbrecher), Baur and Seyfarth show a particular interest in a phenomenon that is partly responsible for the photograph’s rampant proliferation: the archive. They present classics of the genre like Ed Ruscha’s Thirty-four Parking Lots in Los Angeles, 1967, and Richard Prince’s Upstate, 1995–99. More recent works include Peter Piller’s Luftbildarchiv (Air-Photo Archive), 2004, which unpacks the files of a company that creates aerial portraits of houses. Olafur Eliasson also contributes aerial photographs, capturing eerie, abstract Icelandic vistas in his “Cartographic Series,” 2000. Other artists present groups of photos that have a distinctly criminological flavor (The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Charles Gaines) or that offer glimpses of otherwordly private realms (Guillame Bijl). As a whole, the show arrestingly reasserts the double-aged nature of archive, which seeks to control reality through strategies of exclusion and hyperorganization but which at the same time makes visible what might otherwise disappear.