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Today, more than ever, we live in a forest of signs. It is both a semiotician’s delight and a pleasure for artist and viewer to walk down a street and drink in the myriad images, signage, architecture and other constructs that simultaneously pass before our eyes. Add the obvious noises and sounds, hip hop, brass bands, machinery, conversations and the twittering of birds and beasts, and it becomes the soundtrack to the movie of our lives, our daily performance.

Cologne-based photographer Wolfgang Zurborn has a flair for finding the incongruities of day-to-day life we often overlook as we go about our business. As part of a group exhibition, Of Bodies and Other Things, German Photography from the Weimar to the Berlin Republic, curated by Klaus Honnef, Dressur Real fits uneasily into the trajectory of more traditional German photography.





The main exhibition presents an overview of the history of German photography and touches on how photography has handled the prototypical subjects, bodies and things [Sachen], especially architecture, over the past eighty years. It starts with the rigorous work of August Sander and László Moholy-Nagy, and moves through Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and the aestheticised figures of Leni Riefenstahl and Herbert List. In the postwar years, Neue Sachlichkeit morphed into the topographic typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, et al. Art photography, by the likes of Jürgen Klauke, Katharina Sieverding and Dieter Appelt, explores bodies in different ways and more directly individuates the photographer as a practitioner of his or her own practice and is less associated with a particular movement. Likewise, the rise of fashion photography, here represented by FC Gundlach, Thomas Florschuetz, Wolfgang Tillmans and Gabriele and Helmut Nothhelfer, places emphasis on individual artistic style as a marketing tool.

Dressur Real – the title refers to Roland Barthes’s concept of dressage or conditioning of the eye, a mode of leading the viewer to see things in certain ways – represents a way of seeing the fractured modern world with its overlapping images and contexts. Zurborn has the knack of finding the sublime within the ridiculous condition of modern life, a Dadaist awareness of the found object: the ready-mades of architecture and advertising, the masses in the street, and a surrealist sense of humour in the collision of multi-layered images combined on a single picture plane. He seems to detach the pieces of images from their referents and recombines them into a new mosaic that remains a straight photograph. His photography, at once thoroughly modern in its attention to the post-modern effects of signs and symbols is, however, thoroughly classical and refers the viewer back to the fact that what the camera does best is to represent the world in front of the lens. It’s all there, if only we can condition ourselves to see it. As such, Dressur Real is photo history in a microcosm and humorous to boot.

Bill Kouwenhoven

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