Another new photographer for me is Michael Reisch.

It is quite obvious that he is aligned with what has been termed the ‘German’ school. But there is an interesting twist to the tale.

Reisch works with motifs photographed with a large-format camera. His original contact with reality is the point of departure. He then digitizes his negatives and processes them on a computer, isolating found structures and exposing their underlying features. In this way, the artist radicalizes the entire image. Above all, these interventions redefine the relationship between inside and outside. In “Architectures,” the concern is with the relationship between building interiors and outdoor surroundings; in “Landscapes,” the focus is on the question of how settings that fulfill people’s longings are constituted and concentrated within the context of vegetation and topographic modulation.

By digitally isolating elements of the scenes he photographs and removing evidence of people, Reisch seems to be reaching for something I was looking for in my Urplace project, a sense of archetypical landscape, although he goes further and seems to be suggesting, or intending to suggest, a moral component

Why does Michael Reisch transform the world of human life into a world of inanimate structures? There are two different answers to this question. The first relates to the massive changes in our living environment that took place during the late nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, changes which were originally envisioned as a means of realizing the utopias of the modern age for society at large. The second answer involves an assessment of this project of the modern age: Can universal happiness be achieved through responsible action?

Reisch’s photographs present a world without resistance and a world without observers. Although their format is comparable in scale to that of the viewer, their subjects make it clear that they have evolved into alien species that increasingly evade the viewer’s control. The presence of structure in the buildings is intensified into something uncanny. In the landscapes, topographic modulation and green growth are transformed into the auto-dynamics of biomass. Both are aloof from human intervention and involved in a process of constant subliminal growth—an autonomous process of formation in which the world no longer offers a point of reference. It is a totalized world in itself in which it is no longer possible to observe the effects or consequences of events precisely.

I kinda like the idea of shooting LF and then making digital pics out of it!