Pathos as Distance - Hardcover

Mühe, Andreas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3868288325 ISBN 13: 9783868288322

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag, 2017

Synopsis

Works from all series and phases of Andreas Mühe’s oeuvre are presented, including renowned series such as "Obersalzberg" (2010–2013) and "A.M." (2013) as well as previously unpublished works. The photographs are accompanied by excerpts from the novel "1913 – The Year before the Storm" by Florian Illies.

About this title

About the Author

Andreas Mühe (b. 1979, Karl-Marx-Stadt) came to photography through an apprenticeship as a photo laboratory technician, after which he worked as an assistant to Ali Kepenek and Anatol Kotte. Mühe has worked as a freelance photographer and has published his portraits of actors, musicians, and artists in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers. An early supporter is F.C. Gundlach, who describes his work as being “of extraordinary consequence.” Since 2010, Mühe has exhibited his works in solo and group exhibitions at museums including the Kunsthalle Rostock, the NRW Forum in Düsseldorf, the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the Benaki Museum in Athens, and the House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The chalk cliffs on Rügen, the Zugspitze,Villa Hügel in Essen, the Lorelei on the Rhine, the massive head of Karl Marx in Chemnitz : selected locations of German culture and history, photographed looking out from the window of a limousine, in photographic vignettes that force the viewer to concentrate because they only offer a partial view. From a distance that seems cool and artificial, through the bulletproof glass, the photographer directs our gaze at parts of the landscape over the chancellor’s shoulder. We have seen the blazer, the haircut, and the jewelry a thousand times before. A. M. – Eine Deutschlandreise (A. M. – A Tour of Germany) is the title of the series, although Angela Merkel’s face is never shown. What looks like Merkel was in fact a model. The photos show how A. M.―Andreas Mühe―sees Germany. Mühe crafts an intense, idiosyncratic, and provocative style, weaves context, places allusions. His works deal with clichees of German moods, exaggerations, and the stagings and distortions of the powerful. Far from heroic poses, he creates a visually mysterious presence. This is the case, for instance, in his photographs of Konrad Adenauer’s study, the houses of highranking East German officials in Wandlitz, the Italian ambassador at his embassy, or the meticulously choreographed portraits of the band Rammstein. A second, cool level from the sworn potential between the photographer and the subject is also evident. It plays with the illusion that one shows everything, while the other sees everything, and yet it is all staged. Mühe uses photography as a tool that evokes mysterious ‘pathos’ on the one hand and ‘distance’ on the other hand in order to lampoon such established visual formulas of exaggeration and distinction. Mühe’s pictures are theatrically staged, dramatically lit, and carefully arranged, and they exude a touch of irony while eliciting contradictory emotions from us. The view from the perch, the hunter’s perspective, becomes a symbol of the marksman with a steady hand, the sharpshooting photographer. Some photographs seem ghostly, suffused with an atmosphere of death, in an intimate synthesis of day and night, dream and reality. These same feelings also come over the viewer of Arnold Boecklin’s painting Isle of the Dead: here Andreas Mühe’s photography shows links to the paintings of this nineteenth-century master. Andreas Mühe, an agent provocateur of photography, is among the most unusual and most successful young German photographers shaping contemporary photography. He accompanied Angela Merkel on tripsabroad, which earned him the label of ‘chancellor’s photographer’ and inspired the idea for A. M. – Eine Deutschlandreise. Andreas Mühe works on the fine line between commissioned and artistic photography; he has taken portraits of prominent musicians, politicians, actors, and artists, and created landscapes full of allusions to art history. The exhibition that we are presenting in the House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg is entitled Pathos as Distance. It provokes controversy and plays with long-outdated cliches from the history of philosophy. Pleasing imagery has no place here! Power is his subject, says Mühe. Thus, the exhibition proves to be a confusing double game of history and present, between trivialization and a sensuousness laden with meaning. What remains is the remarkable suggestive power of his photographs. ― Dr. Dirk Luckow, Director Deichtorhallen Hamburg GmbH

Edition details

• Publisher: Kehrer Verlag
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3868288325
• ISBN 13: 9783868288322
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260