Deep Surface
of the surface of things
I In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.
II From my balcony, I survey the yellow air, Reading where I have written, "The spring is like a belle undressing."
III The gold tree is blue. The singer has pulled his cloak over his head. The moon is in the folds of the cloak.
Wallace Stevens
deep surface is not (or not yet) a project but a flux, merging materials and ideas. It's an ongoing work dealing with possibilities of non-narrative narratives, not necessarily with a sequence and a straight fil rouge, but an investigation of alternatives to storytelling - a visual language that's simultaneously, more similar to an écriture automatique, giving a second, a third life to images - not necessarily my own, reflecting also on authorship.
Not untied from the idea of photography as a parallel space-time-linked medium, it still reflects on veracity, on the complexness of realities and their possible rearrangements, also in a cut and paste society, on representation and the parallel desire towards the tactile, organic and immaterial.
Photography is linked to actions, incidental or generated, staged or spontaneous. Two different image making approaches are combined in deep surface. On one side the procedure of creating collages, almost sculptural creations of assembled materials - bodies, plants, fragments, shapes - unstable and precarious, but with a tangibile and three dimensional pleasure of existence, of combining, reshaping, physically manipulating and then being rephotographed with different lightings, for keeping the trace of something palpable yet ephemeral, bringing it once again back to a bidimensional surface. Intertwined with images of found sceneries, they both are projection screens of imagination and deja-vu, a liminal threshold of associations.
To whom may they belong next?
Bärbel Reinhard born in Stuttgart, Germany lives and works in Tuscany. After her M.A. in art history and sociology at Humboldt-University in Berlin, she graduated in Photography at Fondazione Studio Marangoni in Florence. Beside her work as a photography teacher and curator she's working as a freelance photographer. Her work has been exhibited in various shows in Italy and abroad, such as at the European Month of Photography Luxembourg, at galleria Metronom in Modena and New York University Florence.