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November 12, 2008
Rut Blees Luxemburg is well known for her investigations into the urbanscape. She takes photographs at night on the edge of the centre of the city with a 5x4, and the long exposures allow her to use the light emanating from the street only – from office blocks and street lights. She seeks out hidden spaces, and overlooked, abandoned or even threatening areas of otherwise familiar cities.
If the city by day is a crowded and lively place by night, empty corners and dark shadows can suggest sinister possibilities and create a highly charged atmosphere that suggests an urban dystopia.
Rut Blees Luxemburg, Enges Bretterhaus/Narrow Stage 1998, C-print
Rut Blees Luxemburg A Modern Project was a series of photographs of gritty night-time views of a depopulated London, illuminated only by the eerie glow of streetlamps. Each image in the series depicts an area of the city as a site of menace and as an arena for potential encounter. All transitory events are removed from the images. There are no people, and no moving cars.
So the normally experienced flow of time in modernity is removed from the city and we are left with spaces. The images have a markedly architectural quality.
Blees Luxemburg followed A Modern Project with Liebeslied, a series of fourteen photographs taken between 1997 and 2000. These images, subtly influenced by the work of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), are more lyrical and abstract; yet still take the forgotten corners of night-time London as their main subject.
Rut Blees Luxemburg, Liebeslied, 1997, C-Print on aluminium
The Liebeslied is the elusive writing on the wall which seemed always more than just graffiti or some quick communication. Rut says:
It looks like a very private form of communication, the opposite of most graffiti or street writing which might tend to be a disenfranchised citizen announcing something to the world in general....It is very considered. The scale is intimate. It is writing at the scale of the body. Or a page.So I came and photographed it. It seems private. I’m attracted to the heimlichkeit of a space in the public. A space that allows for a moment of repose.
She adds that the idea of the Liebeslied suggests that intimacy of communication. An attention to another experience of the public. Not the great, grand declamation but the small theatrical spaces and gestures.
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Gary
an interesting point is made in this interview at Union Gallery:
The response to this and the surveillance by those with power is public photography at night.