Judith Samen

Photographic portraits derive their tension from the visual presence of the model as an individual and their place within contemporary social structures. The boundaries of these two frames of reference, however, resist hasty attempts to pin them down. This is because their criteria and approaches are rooted in the viewer’s subjective pool of experience and are difficult to objectify. In her photographs, Judith Samen aims to reflect on these aspects and to explore their effectiveness within the open process of orientation and evaluation that guides our encounter with images of people.

The artist places her models against colorful, pictorially parallel backgrounds in a stage-like space, which they not only fill with their commanding physical presence but actually create themselves. Sparingly used kitchen props and food items take on classic compositional functions. The figures’ gestures and postures, like their archaic-seeming physicality, seem to be rooted in traditional visual imagery, yet they are clearly recognizable as contemporary staged scenes in the artist’s studio. This gives rise to a complex web of references drawn from collective visual memories and everyday experiences, at the intersections of which the timelessness and absolute presence of the depicted figures converge. The aesthetic discourse on the phenomenon of time and temporality initiated in Judith Samen’s works thus gains a further dimension beyond its positioning between duration and the moment. It raises the question of the relationship between painting and photography on a conceptual level that integrates and transcends motifs and coloration.

If, in the image of the naked pregnant woman, a dialogue about different qualities of majesty unfolds between her imposing body and the cardinal-red pictorial space, then this appears equally absurd and plausible on an immediate, animalistic level. At the same time, the figure’s obviously staged state of mind—one of melancholic contemplation and detachment—is subverted by a healthy dose of wit and self-irony, without negating the personal, intimate moment she brings to the scene or exposing it to ridicule. In the idiosyncratic blend of seriousness and ironic distance with which the subjects follow the artist’s stage directions, boundaries once thought to be certain—such as those between the sublime and the banal—blur. The artist herself, as a pregnant woman, wears her Rapunzel wig made of plumber’s hemp with the same dignity as other models wear their patterned lab coats, floral nightgowns, woolen long johns, or baker’s hats. In this way, Judith Samen entrusts the distinction between the supposedly authentic and the staged to the power of the memorable image, whose precise compositions inextricably interweave the documentary and the fictional.

In his most recent works from 2002, scenic elements expand the exploration of different temporal planes. Instead of showing the full figure, the photographs now depict only partial views of the subjects’ bodies. On the one hand, the subject thus eludes the all-consuming gaze of the viewer; on the other hand, the camera moves closer to him and integrates a moment of potential movement into the imagery. Of the young man’s face in the white 1970s coat, only his mouth and chin are visible. The center of the image lies at the level of the camera’s eye, near his slightly outstretched hands. In each hand he holds—both concealing and revealing—a quail plucked and ready for the kitchen, as if he had transferred his own animalistic nakedness onto these two pitiful creatures, whereas the coat—hermetically sealed with diagonal zippers—seems to absorb his body and bind it to the flat white background of the image. In this constellation, the hands take on something both oppressive and alluring—though less in the sense of a cinematically driven plot than in the sense of an open gesture in the figure’s moment of pause. The narrative element in the new photographs suggests an enigmatic significance that the viewer sets out to decipher, while before their very eyes the ordinary and the extraordinary unexpectedly merge into an image that lodges itself in the memory.

Gudrun Bott, Ringenberg Castle, 2002