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Conjugation
A house in the woods. A house at the edge of the woods. The road to the house at the edge of the woods. The house is surrounded by fir trees. The house lies on a slope. The house lies in the middle of the countryside.
When we built the house. When we saw the finished house for the very first time. The house is even more beautiful than on the plans. Our beautiful house in the woods.
The first photograph of our house on the edge of the woods. The slide shows our house. My wife is standing at the living room window. She is looking from the living room window straight into the woods.
The architect that designed the house. He designed the house according to our plans. In the plans, the trees that stand in front of the house were included. We did not want to cut down all the trees because our house lies in the woods.
We planted the garden of our house ourselves. Shrubs and plants that grow in semi-shade and that will grow well around our house in the woods. The quality of the air around the house is good because of the woods.
The driveway to the house was levelled off with a gravel stone path so that the natural surroundings were preserved. We live in natural surroundings.
The view from the house into the woods. From all windows you can see the woods. In the house, you can hear the wind rustling in the trees. It is very calm in our house at the edge of the woods.
The house is insured against forest fires. The insurance company insures houses that lie in the woods if they are connected by a reasonable access road.
By car, it’s a quarter of an hour to the town because our house lies in the upper part of the woods. The friends who visit us always say how beautiful it is in our house in the woods. Birgit Szepanski

Real estate consultancy
And we had that building loan agreement and we both had jobs. And so for the children, we built this house away from the city in the wood on a loan. See this photo – that’s what it looked like. Behind there is where you went down to the lake; every morning in summer, at the weekend sand castles and an old rowing boat for trips. The balcony faced south and we sat there in the evenings and barbecued or played canasta or rummy with friends till the mosquitoes came and mostly longer. And in the winter we showed slides on the living room wall – like this one here – and showed friends (and ourselves) what a good life we had in the place where we now lived. Until something unexpected happened between us, I think, first with you. And I never understood why. And so we left the woods and the lake behind us and the beach and our sand castles in various directions (you took the children) and had a print made of this photograph and gave it to the real estate consultant. And he sorted us into his catalogue of failed houses and put an advert in the local newspaper: “House for sale: Lake view, beach location, 5 rooms, oil central heating, 330,000 Marks” and this photo along with it.
That’s the way it happened back then. Much too fast.
Pictures don’t want to left alone. Rainer Totzke

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Agony of the Real*
Think up an art project: Photograph children with their stuffed toys in front of living room cupboard units. Observe the children’s attachment behaviour towards their stuffed toys, their private way of talking to their animals. Fix the children’s gaze onto the eyes of the observer and the parents simultaneously. And in the wall unit, the definitive media of the past century or centuries should stand in rows: television and books. This photo – a social study and a media allegory at the same time. One of the books on the top shelf might be “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” on closer inspection, and in this book, someone would also speak to his stuffed toys: The lesson of Eternal Recurrence and the Eternal Recurrence of the misunderstanding of this lesson, pure fatalism in fact. And this is what is meant by the damned Agony of the Real, a phrase that gets into us, gets into the media, on television programmes, into photos and texts, words acting like pictures and so speaking a thousand words but still remaining empty in some way. And Nietzsche had a problem too with his attachment behaviour, the child could be saying, while on television, a news broadcast with images of Mogadishu airport in autumn 1977 would be on the screen, arranged by Nam June Paik of course, while at the same time, Father or Mother would be saying to the child: “Yes, stand there – yes, like that, hold the stuffed toy higher – and now, smile!” and they would simply photograph the entire arrangement with this Kodak film. While at the same time, we would be forced to wonder whether we could live free of revenge one day. Free of revenge for having spent our childhood in front of wall units such as these, free of revenge for having been socialised in such living rooms and in such photographs. While at the same time, the ‘70s was coming to an official end at last, just as the future was coming towards us. While at the same time, pictures of islands or coasts by the sea, candlesticks and Swiss Cheese plants kept resurfacing from within us and we hoped to find an explanation for them in the composition, for example: “But pictures have syntax!” While our unconscious kept on transfiguring itself in face of this photograph that represents an occasion, nothing more, and that we would finally understand this, and at the same time what that would mean: an image that oversteps itself! Rainer Totzke

*Translation of the book title “Agonie des Realen” by Baudrillard (1978, Merve) and a “Feuilleton catchword” (Totzke) in German newspapers.

Photograph category child
Since the inception of photography, children and toddlers have been depicted in reconstructed or real interiors of homes. The interior is attributed qualities of property, travel and cultural tradition. Objects are arranged in the composition to frame the child photographed, showing her in the social setting of the family. The child in the portrait is a part of the presentation of property, of worldly goods, and forms another category alongside travel and tradition.
A girl, with a stuffed toy, a child-sized polar bear. A modern resumption of the motif of polar bear furs, on which the children of wealthy families were photographed at the beginning of the 20th century. On the wooden-panelled wall, a painting with rocks, water and island – symbols of travel. A view of a seashore; longing and desire for faraway places.
Travel-property-ownership. Travel souvenirs. Supplements to necessary household equipment. Souvenirs of distant destinations, holiday periods and the privileges of travel. A tea set made of yellow, light metal, perhaps from Morocco, demonstrates cultural openness. A mouth-blown glass fish from the North Sea island Bornholm, a souvenir from a short trip. The leafy plant, an object of cultivation and part of the living room equipment. A transferred relict from palm gardens, orangeries and tea houses.
The television’s empty screen, a potential sign for the view of the world, participation in world events, the need for daily information and private entertainment.
The girl is positioned exactly in the centre of these signs and categories. She shows herself and her stuffed animal to the camera. Category girl in the category interior of property. Stuffed animal property and stuffed animal owner, small format in large format, guarantor of the future in one’s own home. Birgit Szepanski

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Rituale
Dressing. Undressing. Mornings. Pulling a sweater over his head. Getting an arm into a sleeve. Wedging the other arm into the pullover. Then, even though it always slips out, pulling it into the sleeve and grabbing the little hand. Then pulling the hand into the narrow sleeve opening.
Evenings. Taking off the pullover. Putting on the pyjama top. Putting on the pyjama bottoms. Little hands pulling on the blouse. Teeth biting into the backs of hands. The little body goes limp. The body rears up. The body twists and turns. The hands, both arms, legs, mouth and the little teeth are everywhere and nowhere to be held.
Dressing. Undressing. Pulling. He pulls. She pulls, tugs, shoves. He twists, slips away from her hands, runs into her arms, he holds on tight, wants to be held, pushes himself away. Fists clench, hands grab each other, heads touch. Everyday choreography. And knowing that it’s like this, that one grabs, struggles, surrounds, is mother and child.
The father watches and picks up the camera. For him, the view is an evening ceremony that shows him that he has a living son, and that his wife looks after him. He photographs a daily ritual between mother and child. That entanglement of intimacy and distance, of countless actions where bodies relate to each other, roles are tried out and re-established every day.
This private photograph opens up the view of a daily ritual in a familiar world. The actors stick to their roles, the temporal sequences are fixed – in this intimate world of daily routines, the observer peers in. Birgit Szepanski

Pictures with a migration background
Oriental folklore: Mary with the Baby Jesus before bedtime. The open expression, the boy’s smile towards the photographer who could be his proud, happy father. The mother: in close contact with the child, immersed in unimaginable, Oriental feelings of motherhood, taking full pleasure in the moment, especially and including the moment of being photographed, taking part with closed eyes. This “being-inundated-by-emotions!” This picture is like a mother-child icon. This means one can export one’s feelings in this direction. Because we know that mother-child feelings and even father-mother-child feelings in our culture are always best exported or “immigrated” to the Orient. For 2000 years for example, Mary and the Baby Jesus from Palestine have been the real migration backgrounds for our real feelings. This photograph makes them visible, you could say, and thereby formulate a Theory of Understanding, a Theory of Understanding Oneself in Pictures. A Theory of Understanding-Oneself-In-Understanding-One’s-Foreignness-In-Photographs, a theory of unconscious separation and reintegration.
And in the context of this picture, you could also comment on the crisis of ethnographic representation, on the question of what we actually do when we really go into the field of ethnology and research the “real” social contours of image use in foreign cultures; what we really do when we create theories about how certain practices of image creation or image use (capturing them, giving them as presents, hanging/throwing them on/at the wall, throwing darts at them, ripping them up, burning, framing, painting over them or handing them down) promote or guide social relations, or at the least how they should promote or guide them in the eyes of the participants. And one could link an anthropology of feelings or cultural hermeneutics – a cultural hermeneutics of the photographic “fusion of horizons”* or irrevocable difference. And one could ask oneself how to deal productively with the Eurocentric claim that Western culture has become so reflexive, that it is able to address and photograph its own social and cultural conditionality, its own fundamental contingency.
Pictures are occasions for the migration of our thinking. Rainer Totzke

*This is a term coined by Hans-Georg Gadamer, a German philosopher of the continental tradition.

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Going back
Going back. Pictures that go back, people that go back with their expressions, souls, who go back with their projections. These are my grandparents, for example. They are looking at me from a time before my time, after my time – their expression can be located somewhere in the interim between two worlds, and so can this picture. This expression-picture is witness to an aesthetic of appearance, and an aesthetic of disappearance (fading) and re-appearance. Reincarnation = re-iconisation. Indian souls that have been photographed, I think, I feel. And I go back to this picture. This picture is an allegory for the submergence of time, for the process of becoming invisible and by which pictures become invisible too. This picture makes you speechless. It is a picture from a series of pictures that make you speechless. This picture is a meta-picture. This picture is the odd one out in the series. This picture is a picture from the series of odd ones out and I quote: What we see looks at us! – Or it does not look at us but sees right through us to the finiteness of our existence so that we become transparent to ourselves in this picture, become transparent ourselves, perhaps as Heidegger once thought – except that he was not referring to private photographs. Rainer Totzke

Life
A life without photography. A life that does not need an image or confirmation. Life with another kind of memory. This private photograph was taken for descendants, for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. As a memento for future generations.
The expression and the posture of the old woman and old man seem to speak of another life. A life that was not glossed over but that was lived as best it could and as it was and perhaps just as simply – side by side, as the shoulders touch, as carefully as the collars and shirt sleeves end and as carefully as the rows of buttons and lines of zips run along their bodies.
The medium of photography, the short exposure, the creation of an image meets a counter-expression. The expression of two people who are silent. Silence is the picture. The direct gaze into the camera is the picture. Their untold story is the picture.
A photograph that does not conjure up a narrative. A photograph that is silent and evokes a strange stillness: Enduring life. With everything that comes and goes, decays, and nothing that cannot happen, in attitude, with folded hands, direct expression, serious, just like generations past – and none other after them. Birgit Szepanski

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Aura photography
Christmas. This is what Christmas should look like: real tree, real candles, real light, real Christmas carols (at least the beginning of carols and the chorus) in the background, of course, the real Christmas story. Jesus Christ, Bethlehem, the Three Kings on the road from the Orient, stars and angels everywhere, that goes without saying – who believes is blessed – as invented tradition linked to real feelings, detectable on the cerebral cortex. And to take a real photograph of all this is possible, even necessary, because it then turns Christmas into Christmas for our senses. And that means it is only made visible as a complete work of art in reality and the aura is photographed in passing. It is therefore still possible: the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility and associating it with the term aura! Little cameras should be hung on the Christmas tree out of sheer gratitude. That is art! Rainer Totzke

Landscapes in the living room
A room with a door onto other rooms. A closed window. Outside emptiness. In the room, contours appear in the darkness: Rises, falls, light refractions, hollows, depths and highlights. Light that surrounds. Light that is created in the darkness. The walls recede, widen, the corners of the room dissolve.
Lush darkness. The room disappears. A landscape is created. In it, more landscapes lie: mountains, plains, faraway cities, motorway networks, jagged regions. They spread out, map themselves onto the dim area of the room, etch themselves into the walls, multiply and get lost in an endlessly fanned out, dimly-lit room.
Behind the door is darkness, behind the window is a black emptiness – in the instant that the photograph was taken, and in the view that the photographer took in.
Velvety darkness and an endless depth in the room. A mise en scéne that is revived every year. That makes the room disappear, makes a place for lost pictures. Pictures of longing. Landscape pictures. Darkness pictures. Light landscapes. Light that creates narrow contours, highlights, individual spectrums, just so that the floating view can find its way in that endless room landscape. Birgit Szepanski

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Parallel projection
The light, the shadows and the colours reveal that this photograph is posed. It must have been planned and contrived. Eroticism is always contrived.
You can project your fantasies onto this photograph: is the woman slipping her nightdress on or off? Is the man asleep or just pretending to sleep? Does she know that he is just pretending, or does he know that she knows he is just pretending? Is it a familiar game between the two that will dissipate into giggles and kisses, where the bed covers will slip off soon afterwards as they always do during sex – and will the photographer then continue to stand in the door and take photographs? Is it part of an erotic game arranged between the three because the photographer, a woman, happens to be the couple’s best friend and what happens next has been left open…? You could also project yourself into this situation, using the slide for your own erotic or sexual habits – preferably at home, of course. For example, you could invite friends over and give a slideshow on the theme Eros and Kitsch, a lead-in to a very frank discussion about what you all find erotic and kitsch and what not, like people used to in the past. Or perhaps you would rather use the slide projector, just the two of you, and project this slide onto the opposite bedroom wall, standing and making love in the circle of light, like others do in the mirror. Or later, when you are older, keep it as a memory. Or sell the slide on ebay.
There is always a way out. Rainer Totzke

Scenography
This photograph stages erotic motifs. They have been set up in detail in the choice of the objects visible, the lighting, the creases in the white bed cover, the half-suggested empty space of the bed, the nightdress being pulled over her head and the fleeting shadow on the wall.
This photograph sets up a frame in which private eroticism can be painted. The frame and the performance it contain belong to the early 1970s when white furniture was common in hotels and private bedrooms and when small, red shaded wall lamps emphasized an exotic ambience.
The alarm clock is set to twenty minutes past eleven: a time when fantasies are allowed to begin. The rose head in the white vase corresponds to the lamps, suggesting a nuance of colour in the brightly lit, bright white room like an exclamation mark, a hypostasized gesture or evocation of stimulation.
The bedroom is lit by several light sources. Silhouettes from the nightdress being pulled over the woman’s head made by the wall lamps, form on the wall and the bed staging a third presence in the room.
In the juxtaposition and simultaneity of these dramatic effects, and the typecast of the couple, an anonymous entrance is created, an imaginary door for any observer who would like to plunge into this image-scenography. Birgit Szepanski

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Being a Child
From what perspective can one say something about this slide? What punctum catches the eye of the observer and what happened in the lead up to this photograph? Is what we see a promise of truth from a private photographer?
Quite evidently at the centre of the photograph:
A  child, plump and adorable, white baby clothes, little balls of the feet, red, wispy toddler’s hair, chubby cheeks and large eyes, innocent gaze upwards, accentuated by the grotesque situation of sitting in a tea trolley. Next to her, the father, steadying the tea trolley with one hand, reading and yet not reading, smiling and yet not smiling. Is his outstretched leg protecting the child – or with a gentle physical supremacy, is he stopping the child from getting down from the tea trolley until the photo has been taken?
The impulse for the photograph: the child, its Being Sweet, its sweet being – the thing that is attributed to childlikeness, that is supposedly Being a Child and that is nevertheless not. As long as it took for this photograph to be taken, as long as the camera was being fetched and the photographer pressed the shutter, the child stays in the tea trolley, imprisoned in Being Sweet. The child’s Being-with-Oneself, the reconnaissance of the tea trolley, the fingers exploring a smooth, mirrored Formica surface continuing until someone cried  And look over here now, and where is…?
And what is latently present in this photograph is a kind of quiet betrayal – the parents have peered at, giggled at this childlike awkwardness, the limited horizons of her thirst for discovery. They are pleased that their child is little and sweet and is sitting in a tea trolley without knowing what this object is – and in doing so, they forgot what constitutes Being a Child, the Not Having to Know of Being in the World.
And here, now, directly at hand, the photographic evidence of an almost perfect oblivion of that first, tender here-and-now of an ego. The foot, the father, the distance, the hidden smile, a stand, calling out, turning around from exploring with fingers: the immediate reality. And arising from it, a memento of a child-being, that does not require a staged memory. Birgit Szepanski

Vanishing lines
Attention guide I: We try an interpretation. We run away. The panels of the open door act as vanishing lines in this picture. Signal white as signal red. Father and child, the constellation of the figures in the room and their gazes that guide the attention of the observer as well as the photographer. We are tempted to add vanishing lines to this picture, arrows of vision on which our understanding snags, or on which reprimands and meanings stand out in the index of time.
Attention guide II: Or alternatively, we apply that modern process of eye-tracking. We entrust ourselves to complicated apparatus to analyse our eye movements. Our head is fixed and then this photo is put in front of us while a camera scans our iris and its movements, and transfers this iris-movement data to a computer that in turn projects the fixation points of the eyes and their temporal change back onto the photograph in a diagrammatic process, drawing the corresponding dots and lines onto the picture and thereby portraying the temporal process of seeing and attention. The apparatus makes the most distinctive elements of the photo visible and the places where our gaze keeps returning to…and where our gaze keeps returning to; that could be the meaning of the photograph.
Attention guide III: And what it says about our own relationship to Father and Child that we read and write this here and snag exactly on this part, that we begin (or put to an end?) this analysis of attention or begin a theory of memory or re-remembrance of the ideal gaze situation between father and child or between child and third person (the mother?) whom the child is obviously looking at and keeping/ establishing contact with and smiling, smiling for acknowledgment, a person (the mother?) obviously outside of the picture frame to whom the child has a relationship, there under the side table, while the relationship to the father is as it is, whether he flicks through a magazine for parents or an Ikea catalogue or the instructions for a new video recorder or has sunk into any other technical cliché in the meantime; the magazine, “The Model Railway Enthusiast” for example. We could also make a family constellation out of this picture, for example, or we could talk explicitly about feelings in this four-person play (father, child, invisible person (mother?), invisible photographer/observer) but that would be too vague, that would surely be too vague, like talking about colour and the connection between colour and feelings in photos that are recorded by analogue machines.
Attention guide IV: But we could also simply find this child adorable, the way she alters the function of things in her childhood-ness and smallness and adorableness, all by herself, turning the side tables for remote controls and beer into little railway carriages with catering on the roof or into caves that you can climb inside. Or we could ask why it touches us, this adorable-little-child-scheme, over and over again. And we could invent a Theory of Adorableness for it. That too would be a possibility for interpretation or for running away.
The world consists of vanishing lines. Rainer Totzke

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Being Different
Children’s games. Games children play. Age-old movements, varieties that exist through space and time. Words that are shouted, whispered and remain silent. Hands that carry out rituals and thereby discover new things. The sudden, the unexpected in a repeated occurrence. A breathing-in of existence. In the Now. In movement.
And all this photographed with a serious lightness. The autumnal smell of grass and earth, the coolness of the iron pole beneath her fingers, the fluffy edge of the suede coat sleeves. The woollen scarf in your face, scratchiness, looking into the darkness and all around voices, breathing, your own voice, counting, footsteps. Muted steps, thoughtful movements, hiding yourself, being cunning and running, getting your turn. Children play life within seconds.
Unselfconsciously in a time loop. And later, continuing to dream, daydreams. Picturing replays and making a wish. And knowing the difference: N. was wearing new boots and her beautiful winter coat and she often decided what we played, J. did what we said and N. called out I’m the queen of the world and I explained.
Finding the Being-as-it-is and Being Different in games. I am, I am not you and I am the queen of the world. In view of this photograph: Children, who play age-old games and invent themselves.   Birgit Szepanski

Tiresias
Playing blind man’s buff
as a child in photos
blindly wandering
blindly understanding each other on the
retina of the world
Playing fate with blindfolded eyes
and exhausting the blind metaphors
to the end
Pieter Bruegel
in this photograph
living in Braille
feeling for the future
with blindfolded eyes
close your eyes again
and really imagine the eyes
of the others who are also
playing blind man’s buff
or are thinking up other imaging techniques
for the fate
of the blind seer of tomorrow.
Rainer Totzke

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Bricolage
To have survived the first half of the 20^th century, simply to have survived as a family like this shed in the patchwork of wars and memories, and now to sit tight with coffee and cake and to piece together the collective memory and while speaking, digging up the dead who have died from August 1914 up until now. Who would be sitting here with us things had gone differently ‘before Verdun’ for example or even before ‘before Verdun’, more peacefully perhaps and without using Sarajevo as an opportunity and if great-grandpa Heinrich hadn’t been killed in action right at the beginning of the war without receiving the Iron Cross, and great-grandma having just got pregnant for the fourth time and him not even seeing him, his Friedrich who turned out so well, at first anyway before he ended up with the Storm Troopers a few years later and voted right away for Hitler and joined the Wehrmacht in 1939 and was promoted to sergeant until he was eventually reported missing on the Eastern Front in 1943. How it would be if it had all gone differently and he was sitting with us now and the same goes for his two children Horst and Anton who were killed in an air-raid attack in the Ruhr district, late ’44 and their mother Karin came home late one evening just after it was all over and then took her own life three weeks later, just like that. If all that had turned out differently and they were all sitting with us now, for example, even the eldest son Robert, who went to Berlin and married that woman, a Jewess, and the three children all half-Jews of course from 1933. And how there were family rows over this, even from 1932 when they stopped talking to each other, Friedrich and Robert, and if this had turned out differently too, and if they hadn’t come for all three of them when Robert finally got a divorce in 1943 and then signed up to a suicide commando on the Eastern Front. If all that had just turned out differently…
In image theory, one tries to find an appropriate answer to the question: to what extent is it possible to express complex interdependencies with images such as time relations and conditionals. Rainer Totzke

Makeshifts
Sometimes, one has the challenge of writing about something that has been detached, singled out, removed from its original context and a definable time. And yet, our undivided attention is there if a photograph makes itself present again, apparently all by itself. Simply because it shows people and because these people, despite living in another period, appear to be so present. Through their gazes, what they do, the process of being shot in a photographic image. Our participation in the events, gestures and photographic situation occurs about, without hesitation, within a few moments.
A scanning gaze over the photograph can follow details, gain depth in certain places, discover relations and thereby introduce assumptions or thoughts about: a group sitting at a table outdoors, sitting on wooden chairs and benches and having set up a coffee table sheltered from the wind despite or whether the backdrop, a provisional garden house, a men’s jacket hanging on the back of a chair, gives indications about haircuts, clothes and austerity and about the patchwork tarpaper on the garden house.
And then, from the time when this gaze is able to capture all these details, dialogues begin; those conversations that emerge from the stillness of photographs: quiet snippets of talk made of memories, fragments of one’s own stories, possible sentences, dialogues about the figures photographed – and then one composes the smell of the meadow to go with it and perhaps the humming of insects.
After some time, apparently unexpected, the gaze suddenly slides away again: the letterbox on the house, the high grass, wooden chairs and a wooden table, realising that there were no objects made of synthetic material, no sign that says that the 1960s have begun. And the recurring, now rather puzzled gaze at the strange tarpapered house. A second dialogue begins: Colour films first came with the Allies to Germany, résumés that have lived through the 1940s as adults, a house that is probably not makeshift, hard wooden chairs taken from indoors to outside, the beginnings of the Economic Miracle or not, and yet still colour film.
The uncertainties, the imponderability, the unsure, perceptible knowledge. The photograph suddenly develops another moment of reality: The tarpaper on the garden house that is in fact not one, steeped in black tar, raw and patchwork, that is where the gaze lingers, slows down and then becomes calm – this perfect makeshift force, its not splitting apart, the subtle starkness of things transforms into something eerie. Birgit Szepanski