Kim von Kothen
Kim von Kothen’s self-reflexive practice is based upon observing, condensing and synthesising her impressions of her environment into poetic form. Her project “Conversations in between strangers” began by undertaking close observations of the conversational ‘dance’ between herself and various others, charting the dynamics of conservations, making notes on how each game of interaction ebbs and flows. Her work is, then, neither an extended self-portrait, nor strictly speaking a series of portraits of others, but a meditation upon a given situation and the factors which impinge upon it. Her images are not to be read as transparent pictorial windows, opening onto a third imaginary space which we can inhabit unproblematically. The works create their own poetic universe based upon, but distinct from the photographer’s own. This is a manner familiar from the working method of many novelists, and her oeuvre is to be viewed almost as a modernist work of art: as a constellation of artefacts whose justification is their own presence, not that of being subservient, second-hand representations of life outside the picture frame.Von Kothen describes her subjects as “passengers with their own autobiographic load, with their partly given, and partly self-constructed self-presentation”. Through her work, we are made aware of the artifice of self-presentation, and of the language of the photographic image. Indeed the project is, at root, a “narrative about photography” whose aims is to “further debate rather than to depict reality”. To achieve this, her triptychs for example encompass three distinct viewpoints upon a given individual. Firstly: a close-up portrait; second, a study of the room the photographer habitually encountered them in; third, a still-life, or detail of that room in tight focus. Encountering these, we are akin to detectives at a crime scene, piecing evidence together to create a narrative, rather than witnesses of an event. Equally, we achieve this by assessing the evidence of dwelling and analysing how individuals command space, rather than passively accepting a work as an objective description of an individual. We are forced to become aware of the artifice of presenting portraits as though they were transparent or naturalistic documents of others’ lives. Rather, Von Kothen’s project is to explore the fabric of a relationship, and to allow us to enter into the texture of that relationship, rather than to observe another individual as a static object or from a third-person perspective.
