GOTTFRIED JÄGER
Known as one of the greatest figures in German photography, Gottfried Jäger (b. 1937, Burg near Magdeburg) is an exper-imental artist who, over the years, redefined the term ‘photography’. In breaking the boundaries of what the camera can accomplish, Jäger reexamines the objectivity of the photographic process. In 1968, during the movement of Concrete Art, Jäger developed the concept and theory of Generative Photography. In his words, it consists of ‘finding a new world inside the camera and trying to bring it out with methodical and analytical methods.’ Jäger’s generative colour work derives from the colour spectrum and the refraction of white light. Whether analogue or digital, the work is not a representation of colour but a reflection of it. In his ‘colour space,’ Jäger creates paths, crossing from experimentation to programming, from abstraction to concretion, and from analog to computed colour photographs.
Over the long course of his career, through his use of multiple lenses combined with algorithms and computer programs, Gottfried Jäger has developed a new aesthetic. During this time, Jäger has explored optics, mechanisms and materials of photography – and in this book, colour photography specifically – to produce images that have no referents, no antecedents to their own process, and no umbilical cord to an observed world. In the profoundest sense, they are ‘unprecedented’ – says Lyle Rexer.In Jäger’s words, ‘The objective of my work is to induce a generative effect: to constantly provoke an endless generation of new forms and elements in a continuous process of renewal and rebirth. What is intended is not a standstill, but the image of an exchange, its infiltration, and its conversion.
‘Over more than five decades, Jäger has explored the optics, mechanisms and materials of photography – and in this book, color photography specifically – to produce images that have no referents, no antecedents to their own process, and no umbilical cords to an observed world. In the profoundest sense, they are unprecedented.’– Lyle Rexer, in Intersection of Colour, book, published by Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, 2021.
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