“A negative is never finished.” This is how Sigmar Polke once described his approach to photography, signaling his infidelity to one of the basic premises of photographic truth. For Polke, the medium could encompass most anything except an immutable record of a single time and place. This exhibition brings together an excellent sample of photographic works, but it only provides a glimpse of Polke’s voluminous production.
In 1968, Polke published an edition of lithographs titled Hoehere Wesen Befehlen (Higher Beings Commanded), created with photographs that capture his transformation of ordinary objects (and even himself) into palm trees, a favorite motif in his paintings of that era. While the subjects are witty, the compositions are direct: frontal and centered. These are the earliest and also among the most well known works on view here. And they seem highly restrained in comparison with the works he made next—the creased folds of paper processed in pieces, the unfixed chemicals, the out-of-focus and cropped views layered in multiple exposures. Polke’s experimentations with photographic techniques serve very different ends from earlier avant-garde photographers who tried similar tricks: Rather than constructing an image, Polke destroys it, undermines its credibility. The photograph becomes a palimpsest rather than an index.
This careless (or carefree) approach is evident in the sixty-four pictures that comprise the series “Untitled (Kassel),” 1977. Hung in a single long row, the group looks like an unedited printing of every photo on a roll. Figures repeat, compositions are haphazard; the subject of the work becomes the event of photographing an event. The most affecting pictures in the show, however, are also some of the more conventional. Five vibrant prints from Polke’s 1976 trip to the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo depict skeletons in tableaux of conversation or engagement with the photographer: portraits of the dead brought to life by the camera.
