by Paul Zimmerman
The first aspect that draws us to Gustaf Elias’s photographs, exhibited recently at Artifact Projects, is the sense of conflicting tensions that runs throughout his work. His imagery is deeply paradoxical: at once haunting and lyrical, yet also marked by a sense of deformity, estrangement, and detachment. His photographs are Janus-faced, rooted in the realm of lived experience even as they seek to lift both themselves and the viewer toward the sublime. Thus, while Elias’s work persistently strives to transcend the human, it remains grounded in what Thomas Weiskel has aptly described as a “humanistic sublime”—an enticing and productive contradiction.
I can easily imagine the pioneering German photographers Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, were they alive today, engaging in a project not unlike Elias’s. His inventory of organic forms, and his impulse to aestheticize the world of forms and patterns, recalls Renger-Patzsch’s desire in the 1920s to reconcile aesthetic harmony with a sense of universal beauty. Similarly, Blossfeldt’s magnum opus, Urformen der Kunst (1929), was a systematic taxonomic undertaking devoted to the close examination of natural forms. Within these forms, Blossfeldt sought to reveal the organic foundations of human architecture as well as the underlying organic character of culture itself.
Like Blossfeldt’s, Elias’s vision is grounded in an appearance of objectivity, however stark, and in a set of vitalistic principles. As with his predecessors, Elias radically isolates his subjects, transforming them into something strangely surreal. His aggressive magnification of the world’s forms is infused with a compelling eroticism. Yet despite these affinities with the past, the contemporary images before us are strikingly different.
John Berger, in About Looking, observes that photography transforms the world into a series of unrelated, autonomous fragments, reducing history—past and present—to a collection of anecdotes and fleeting moments. It presents, he argues, “a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.” In this sense, Elias’s photographs speak powerfully to transience and contingency—the very conditions that constitute modern life. They embody Berger’s assertion that, for photography to possess the vitality of memory itself, rather than simply function as a record of something already dead, it must engage memory “radially” rather than “unilinearly.”
Elias’s images do more than subliminally reflect the everyday world; they celebrate its fragmentation. Their authenticity lies precisely in their refusal to impose an artificial coherence upon experience. They are cautionary and skeptical works, alerting us to the dangers of projecting order and continuity onto a world that may ultimately resist both. The somber space of lived experience that emerges in one instant is suddenly fractured in the next, withdrawing into a precarious, otherworldly sublime.
Paul Zimmerman is a Manhattan based art critic and a regular contributor to Artery.