As still-life painting emerged as an independent genre, painters sought to render objects with such verisimilitude that the painted image seemed almost to rival their physical presence. Through close observation and technical precision, they made glass appear transparent, metal reflective, fruit fresh and perishable, and dead animals seem almost still alive. Selected and arranged, commonplace things thus acquired both an individual presence and an apparent permanence at odds with their decay.
Photography in its early days shared this desire for exact representation. Indeed, this very capacity initially led the new medium to be understood primarily as a means of documentation rather than as an art form: The inventor of the negative-positive process himself, William Henry Fox Talbot, proposed using it to create visual inventories - the photograph as a "mute testimony" to the objects depicted, turning an individual thing into a specimen. Later theorists have questioned this promise of presence, arguing that the photograph offers only a 'pseudo-presence' and ultimately points to the absence of what it depicts: it freezes a single moment, whereas life unfolds through a continuous sequence of events.
What, then, can still life still do today? What artistic possibilities remain in the deliberate stilling of things? Ingar Krauss' stagings of plants and animals propose a portraiture of another kind, in which human faces and personalities give way to the flora and fauna of his immediate surroundings. Born in East Berlin in 1965, Krauss learned a trade and worked for many years as a psychiatric caregiver before turning to photography in the mid-1990s. After moving his studio from Berlin to the Brandenburg countryside, he became a gardener and began dedicating much of his time to plants and vegetables.
Within stage-like boxes of his own construction, Krauss arranges fruit, vegetables, plants, dead birds and other animals under carefully controlled natural light. His subjects appear as protagonists on a stage, arranged to create geometric tension. The spare compositions recall Juan Sánchez Cotán's still lifes, in which fruit and vegetables hang from strings or rest on stone ledges against deep darkness, their forms sharpened by precise light and shadow.
Working with a large-format camera, Krauss records these arrangements as monochrome analogue photographs on matte gelatin-silver paper, then adds colour by hand with a delicate glaze of oil paint. Rooted in the German Romantic longing for self-knowledge through nature, the works pursue a hidden relationship between human inner life and the worlds of plants and animals. Through careful arrangement and depiction, Krauss seeks to transform commonplace subjects by "replacing inattention with contemplation."
There is nothing macabre about Krauss's still lifes. Rather than invoking vanitas, they are animated by a quiet lightness and a certain playfulness, particularly in the way the vegetables are staged alone or assembled into small ensembles. As Felix Hoffmann writes, Krauss's work "makes visible the oscillation between lightness, life, transience and death."