Still Like Art

Franck’s photographs explore the elemental and expansive qualities of the medium, picturing a world aglow, one that feels known but is rarely seen. Everything builds on everything. Nothing comes from nothing.

Description of the project „Still Like Art “, 2023-ongoing

General idea in my entire work for about 6 years is Using photographs from various archives,such as the Library of Congress, the Digital Commonwealth, and the archives of Zürich’s public research university ETH, alongside my own photographs. These collages become “a game between analog and digital, a one-time jump which creates a surreal world and generates a gaze into a new reality.”

In The Nonexistent Knight, Italo Calvino writes about a specific time of day; “the hour in which one is least certain of the world’s existence.” A related dreamlike time of uncertainty seems to float across the black and white landscapes of Lost, found and seen, a series by the German artist Peter Franck. At first glance one feels compelled to ask: are we looking back or forward? Is this earth or elsewhere?

“What will remain from our here and now...light and shadow and stories that will never change?” asks Franck in Still Like Art. Photography is a medium well suited for the question of remnants. The photographic process is in and of itself built to depict this, and the resulting image is in essence what remains on the film—a physical trace of an optical phenomenon, a comprehension of time. Throughout his images, Franck plays with questions of time and light as well as perception and projection, as he builds a surreal but deeply recognizable world of possibilities.

The photographs manage to steal between times —here is the past and present rolled into the future.

This new reality plays with perception using the endless tools that digital imaging has to offer. The viewer is led through scenes that are slow to unravel, that ask for and reward longer viewing.

Moving through the series one is pushed back and forth between the recognizable and the foreign. We can place ourselves within these scenes but something is always just a bit off, just a bit out of reach. The power of the images is in their demand on the viewer to build a narrative themselves, fleshing out the uncanny. Franck describes the spaces of these photographs as “a stage for stories of the past through the present and into the future.” The images are devoid of people; they are hushed. He suggests that this means “each viewer then writes the piece themself. The viewer is the person in the picture and plays their own piece.”

We as individuals will not remain; instead it is the structures we have built, the landscapes we have touched and marred, the light and shadow of the day that will outlast us.

Franck’s photographs explore the elemental and expansive qualities of the medium, picturing a world aglow, one that feels known but is rarely seen. Photography’s past restrictions meet the unlimited possibility of its present and in constructing his photographic world he proves its existence.