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Maximum Token
“I have little interest in anybody’s appearance. I want to know about their mental acuity” says Michael von Gimbut. What an intrepid statement for someone who takes photographs as a living. However, when you carefully observe pictures taken by this Hamburg native, you experience how the lens of his camera captures individuals and objects and makes them speak to you. A woman without makeup, a nude body in an empty room, a coastal landscape at sunrise – each image appears crystal clear and pure at first glance – yet for the ever-present, minute sensation that there is more to this than meets the eye. The asymmetry of the woman’s face, her eyelids drooping ever so slightly, showing her true age? The naked body, sprawling with forward shyness and dreaming of looking desirable. In unison with the delicate dune-scape, you fear the destructive footprints that the coming morning will bring.
More substance from less; Michael’s works celebrate the art of omission. “The more you know, the less you need”, the photographer explains his purity doctrine. It fundamentally incorporates the concept of doing without. No need for makeup, no need for indispensable items, no need for anything artificial. Nonetheless his shots are bigger than life. It isn’t about capturing normalcy or triteness, more so a boiling down to an essence, a short glimpse at true veracity. No need for special equipment or technique here. For the time being the Hasselblad collects dust in some closet, the expensive lighting gear has been dimmed. “Cutting-edge technology only diverts attention” von Gimbut hints. This yearning for minimalism has led him to depend on two technologically rudimentary tools: a Polaroid - and (who’d believe this?) a cell phone camera, in addition to the ever ready digital camera. For many years, just like many others in his profession, von Gimbut made a quick Polaroid prior to a shoot in order to test for exposure settings. Today his interest does not belie the photo sensitivity of an exposure, it is the moment of creation that maters: “Polaroids are a brief carbon copy of reality; nothing is staged. When you enlarge the image though, you see things that were previously hidden.” Each icon bears a secret, a gesture, a moment of surprise, of ennui, the instant of reckoning. The former advertising professional proceeds ever further with pictures taken with his cell phone camera: reality dissolves into a grainy shadow land, out of which imagined schematic silhouettes suddenly appear. These photographs have a depth, only formerly known to paintings. One wishes to regard them forever, there is so much to read into them.
Less is more. More truth. More abyss. More art.
Sabine Howe 2004

sleeping

solitude

Rose

print

Metamorphose

2004
print

?

1995
print

nude

1990
print

Lucio Battisti

1978
329 mm x 483 mm

Lonzo

1981
329 mm x 483 mm

Charles Mingus

1980
450 mm x 640 mm

Eric Burdon

1982
290 mm x 32,9 mm

Strato - outtake from scorpions cover shooting \

1975
329 mm x 483 mm

reflexx0006

2008
pigment print
100 x 135