Seventeen

During a period of five years, Wiebke Elzel repeatedly returned to the place where the hunting stand with the number 17 painted on it was to be found in order to photograph it from different perspectives and under different weather conditions. For the final project of her studies in 2006, she concluded this work in progress by gathering a selection of 84 pictures together into one comprehensive work of art in an oversized frame consisting of individual compartments. Seventeen is at first a thoroughly photographic work—not because of its chronological documentation of the transformation process of the hunting stand as a protagonist slowly deteriorating over the years, but precisely due to the random arrangement of the individual pictures in which the chronological distances between them become irrelevant. This variety of moments and perspectives allows the shooting location in Seventeen to be arranged neatly and so the work suggests its own endless supply of individual pictures. It is not only the presence of Elzel’s subjective position which makes Seventeen unique and which initially distinguishes it as a decisively artistic work from photography orientated towards reality as in the context of documentary photography; the perspective, the details of the image and choice of lighting conditions vary greatly and in some pictures the main subject, the hunting stand, can barely even be seen. But beyond that, the fact that Seventeen itself reflects the question of both artistic and photographic subjectivity is of vital importance. In addition to diverse possibilities for interpreting the motif of the hunting stand (perhaps as a symbol of cultivation or one of surveillance and violence), comparing it to the act of taking a photograph is inevitable in this photographic context. The hunting stand can be read here as a symbol for sounding out the world and the comprehensibility, control and order it strives for, all of which are inherent in photography as well. Thus, the hunting stand as a motif points to its artistic and photographic subject as well as its long-standing task of acquiring through observation, of visual structuring and of imparting information about the world. From this perspective, Seventeen is the equivalent of the tableau Man with Chestnuts which can be understood as an allegory on the artist. Here, seriality as a property specific to the medium of photography is staged as a latent absurd action internal to the picture. Both the hunting stand and the Chestnut Man are solitaires, but in the latter work the gleaming back-lighting makes the visionary creation of a counter-world a crucial theme.