Herbert Weber
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Work from his oeuvre.
“The Toggenburg photo artist Herbert Weber is fascinated by basic issues of the medium he works with. There is definitely some romance involved in his inquiring the truth of images, in spite of the photography’s long-known loss of authenticity… The prominently placed wire may be interpreted as the umbilical cord of photographic self- reflexion. It is reminiscent of the time in which the medium had a leading role in the presentation of reality. And it literally links the picture with its observer, the artist with his audience. With his mostly small-format black-and-white photographs Weber cultivates a role play in service of a pseudo-scientific research. His body is his instrument, his photography is the investigation’s object and goal at the same time. He climbs picturesque trees, wanders on snow-covered ridges, explores the grounds of an inoperative factory or shoots moving clouds in a new moon night—and, with his photographing and photographed body, creates a topography of his own expeditions; this activity’s decelerated and slow habitus is reminiscent of early 19th-century expeditions. And yet, Herbert Weber is a present time artist; with his change of perspective he raises the question of the subject’s construction and the ego’s relation to its own history time and again.” Text by Christoph Doswald for Christinger de Mayo