THE PHOTOMEDIATIONS OF DANIEL VON STURMER
In Daniel Von Sturmer’s practice, the excessive photogeneity of a plastic bag or paper clip promotes awareness that even the most banal, humble objects can be said to be ‘image-ready’. Von Sturmer’s photo-sculptural hybrids, however—combining the material and conceptual territories of photography, painting, video and sculpture—are perceptually unsettling and render problematic the apparent ease with which objects translate into images.
As part of his exhibition, ‘Material from Another Medium’ (Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2001), Von Sturmer staged an architectural intervention by cutting a square into the gallery wall. At first, the viewer assumed they were witnessing a two-dimensional representation until, approaching the work, they realised they were actually looking through a sheet of clear Plexiglass into the gallery’s storeroom. Rather than presenting a visual rendering of objects in flat photographic space, this window-image fell back into objecthood. The traditional ‘three-dimensional into two-dimensional’ relationship was flipped. The work reminded us of our susceptibility to illusion in photography, and how powerfully the codes of photographic seeing have come to dominate our expectations.
Von Sturmer’s window-incision into the gallery storeroom was reminiscent of the apparatus of the camera obscura, and its fixed geographic reciprocity between object and image. If Von Sturmer’s hole in the wall was a photograph, then it could be likened to a point-and-shoot camera, haphazardly—blindly—framing a view of the storeroom, which could not have been visible until the cut was complete. Further, it recalled the historical legitimacy of ‘straight’ photography, where an apparently transparent medium—the Plexiglass, or the photographic lens—dictates the look of actuality: stripped-back and ‘without tricks of process or manipulation’.1
As viewfinder, the Plexiglass window visually activated the storeroom through the gesture of framing. The... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline