Magdalena Hutter, 'Islay Bar', 2007
Magdalena Hutter, 'Spray', 2007
Magdalena Hutter, 'Laphroaig Warehouse 2', 2007
Magdalena Hutter is a German photographer and documentary filmmaker. She has traveled many countries to work on her reportages and photographs, covering places as diverse as Kosovo and Latin America or Los Angeles and Isley in Scotland. Looking at her work, I wondered whether she perceives herself more as a photographer or as a reporter. A quote from German photographer Thomas Struth might help provide an answer when he says that "the image of an empty landscape accommodates the medium of photography in so far as it always involves the present, despite being historically referential"1, suggesting that the border between the two jobs is indeed not always so clear-cut.
Hutter describes herself as a documentary filmmaker rather than as a video artist, alluding to the multifaceted nature of her job, but also perhaps the quest for historical or geographical objectivity. Warehouses, petrol stations, cityscapes, highways or the seaside are the subject of her photographs. Her triptychs usually show a panoramic view of one place: a coach station, a shop or a bus. While almost all her images of urban spaces are devoid of human beings, effects of light and nuances of colours animate her photographs and make them lively. Clouds in the sky, warehouses materials or concrete on the floor, all show delicate nuances of colour and movements of light. Her photographs do not aim at showing a neutral point of view. In fact, the composition of her images is very strong; the buildings are often photographed from a frontal point of view with clear vanishing points.
All these elements (neutrality, frontality, urban space) remind us of the Düsseldorf School, the group of German photographers who used documentary methods in their photographs in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, despite exhibiting certain similarities, Hutter's images are quite different precisely because of their painterly quality.
To see more of her work registered on Saatchi Online click here, and visit the artist's own website, www.magdalenahutter.com.
Victoria Chaine Mendrzyk
1. Art Now, Taschen, 2005 p.302
Victoria Chaine Mendrzyk graduated with an MA Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London and a BA in Philosophy from University of Paris X, Nanterre. She has worked for Beaux-Arts Magazine, the Grand-Palais and at the Maison Rouge in Paris, at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New-York, at Documenta 12 in Kassel and at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. She is also an international correspondent for Art India Magazine.
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