Image creation | A specific kind of nowhere

The Blautopf is a famous feature in the karst landscape near Blaubeuren on the eastern edge of the Swabian Alb. It is the source of the Blau, a river that owes its name not to the color of its water, but to the pre-Germanic term "Blava," and flows into the Danube in Ulm.

The Blautopf is known for the more or less intense, but always striking blue color of its water, depending on the incidence of light. This color is created by a physical effect of light scattering on the lime particles dispersed in the water. "Blautopf, Germany, 2022" is the title of a photograph by Axel Hütte, currently on display in his exhibition "Stille Weiten" (Still Vast Expanses) in Remagen, at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck . The pale blue photograph is composed in such a way that a clear center of the image, and thus an emphasis on the subject, is suspended. Whether the ferns visible are floating in the water cannot be said with certainty. And, as with almost all of Hütte's photographs shown in the exhibition, it is not possible to determine where the photographer or the camera were standing. We cannot be certain of a safe shore.

Regarding his process, which he calls "image creation," Hütte says: "I stand still, marvel, and try to translate this wonder." The photographs titled "Blaubeuren," in which natural colors are inverted into their optical opposite, are abstract, almost psychedelic compositions. In contrast, Hütte's works created in Antarctica evoke a feeling of emptiness. "Through the diverse motifs," says Julian Heynen in the exhibition catalog, "the photographs increasingly focus on a specific kind of nowhere."

Axel Hütte is associated with the Düsseldorf School of Photography, also known as the Becher School. It was established in the late 1970s as a school of artistic photography by Bernd and Hilla Becher. Its centers were the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where Bernd Becher held a professorship for photography from 1976 to 1996, and the Becher studio in Düsseldorf-Kaiserswerth.

The Arp Museum is exhibiting 36 works by Axel Hütte, mostly photographs of mountain ranges, bodies of water, glaciers, but also bridges and flowers, all captured with a plate camera. The images are devoid of people and lack narrative structures. Guided by a strictly compositional vision, Hütte's works are not hastily produced photographs, but rather the result of extensive research and often long journeys to specific locations. Hütte says he let his gaze wander at least 40 times over the Swiss Furka Pass. How often he let his gaze wander to one of the three peaks of the Austrian Totenkopf mountain remains unknown. Hütte presents the rock massif rising from thin wisps of fog as an auratic work. In his essay "A Brief History of Photography," Walter Benjamin calls aura "a strange web of space and time" when, for example, one rests on a summer afternoon and follows a mountain range on the horizon, which casts its shadow on the observer, until the moment or hour participates in its appearance—that is, breathes the aura of these mountains.

Hütte's strictly geometric bridge photographs, such as "St. Marcel, Bridge, France, 1997" or "Ise, Bridge, Japan, 2012/2017," as well as "Blautopf," pose puzzles about the artist's (and thus the eye or camera's) location. Sections of box bridges, parallel to the image, dominate the motif with their grid form. The vegetation in the background is fragmented and can hardly be described as a landscape section. Hütte's bridge images most closely resemble the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose project was a comprehensive inventory of anonymous functional buildings from the era of industrialization, allowing the structures of steel constructions to stand out particularly vividly in their black-and-white photographs.

"Flowers" is the title of the series of photographs in which Hütte lets the flowers emerge from a pitch-black environment, from the middle of nowhere. These flowers have nothing in common with the opulent bouquets of historical paintings. What we see are the shadows of cut flowers, made bright by color inversion, flowers that have moved from nature to the artist's studio, from the landscape to still life, becoming ghosts of themselves. The cold, glowing flower stems are particularly effective when they tower over two meters high on paper prints. The flowers can be seen as symbols of vanitas.

Axel Hütte: "Silent Expanses," Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, until June 15. The catalog of the same name was published by the Walter and Franz König bookstore in Cologne.