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>Staged Presentations of Happiness and Its Destruction
>The notion of the ideal landscape in the Enlightenment and the urban spaces of modernity: these two eras with their respective pictorial genres provide the subject matter for Beate Gütschow’s photographic series LS and S. With these bodies of work she not only portrays flawed and crumbling utopias, but also makes a theoretical statement. On the basis of these works it becomes clear that there are few points of contact between Gütschow’s photographic compositions and the images produced by contemporary artists such as those associated with the “Becher School”; in fact, her works take a stand against these. Beate Gütschow addresses the fundamental issue of photography—the fact that reality and the photographic image represent two different poles and exist in a tense and ultimately irreconcilable relationship to one another—in a quite different way than the photographers who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher in Düsseldorf (including the younger generation that came after Ruff, Struth, Höfer, etc.) and who take what can in the broadest sense be termed a documentary approach to the medium. Gütschow rejects this kind of approach with its suggestion of authenticity, regarding it as a residual form based upon a photographic method that does not adequately address or question the representational nature of photography itself.
>The notion of the ideal landscape in the Enlightenment and the urban spaces of modernity: these two eras with their respective pictorial genres provide the subject matter for Beate Gütschow’s photographic series LS and S. With these bodies of work she not only portrays flawed and crumbling utopias, but also makes a theoretical statement. On the basis of these works it becomes clear that there are few points of contact between Gütschow’s photographic compositions and the images produced by contemporary artists such as those associated with the “Becher School”; in fact, her works take a stand against these. Beate Gütschow addresses the fundamental issue of photography—the fact that reality and the photographic image represent two different poles and exist in a tense and ultimately irreconcilable relationship to one another—in a quite different way than the photographers who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher in Düsseldorf (including the younger generation that came after Ruff, Struth, Höfer, etc.) and who take what can in the broadest sense be termed a documentary approach to the medium. Gütschow rejects this kind of approach with its suggestion of authenticity, regarding it as a residual form based upon a photographic method that does not adequately address or question the representational nature of photography itself.
