Photographic Seriality: Sameness and Difference

Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth are three very prominent contemporary art photographers.  All three were students of Berndt and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, all work in series.  They often–not always–work with large cameras and large prints. There is enough common ground, in fact, for a fairly casual  viewer to underestimate the marked differences among them.

I’m currently reviewing three DVDs by Ralph Goertz, one on each of these artists. Goertz has apparently adapted the conceptual structure of the photographic series to film: by keeping many features the same from one film to the next, he emphasizes the differences between the featured artists.  In all the films, in particular, the “script” consists almost entirely of the artist speaking, in most cases extemporaneously, or apparently so; each film has a number of fixed features, e.g. a close-up shot of the artist making minute adjustments to the camera settings, a recognizably “high art” environment–white gloves, white exhibition spaces, teams of curatorial, archival and installation staff.  In all of them, we hear the same kind of made-to-order rock when we’re looking at the work itself.  Each film starts at a point close to the present, and uses earlier work shown with voiceover to loop back through the artist’s past, concluding with very recent events.  It makes for three very clear, if fairly uneventful films.  As a series, however, the work really comes into its own, putting if  a viewer in a position to see quite unexpected and crucial differences among these three photographers.