Picture Imperfect

When I first saw Susanne Kriemanns work, I thought she was just a photographer. Inside the Neue Nationalgalerie at the 5th Berlin Biennale in 2008, Kriemann presented part of her series 12 650 000 (2008): photographs of the 12,650,000 kilogramme Großbelastungskörper (heavy-load body). This massive concrete cylinder was built in Berlin under the Nazis to see if the citys sandy terrain could support an X-large triumphal arch which was designed by Hitler and Albert Speer but never built (luckily for Berlin).

The black and white pictures viewed from a distance evoked the mute harmony of Bernd and Hilla Bechers studies of industrial buildings. Yet examined up close, the images bore the traces of several photographers (changing perspective, focus and graininess) and several historical periods (from the construction of the cylinder in 1941-42 to its renovation in 2007-08). It turned out that Kriemann was not only a photographer, taking her own pictures of the Großbelastungskörper, but also an enthusiast collecting pictures taken by a host of unnamed photographers across time  perhaps like an adoring fan might add her own snapshot of a favourite Hollywood actor to a collection of stock images of the star.

Last autumn, Kriemann won the 2010 GASAG Art Prize along with a solo show at the Berlinische Galerie. The artist presented material from her extensive series Ashes and Broken Brickwork of a Logical Theory (2009-10). The photographs once again, both found and taken by Kriemann  appear as various parts of an archival study, which seems to begin with the crime writer Agatha Christies sideline career as a photographer for the British Museum. From the 1930s to the 1950s, Christie accompanied her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan on digs throughout the former lands of Mesopotamia and took photographs of the artefacts, the excavation sites and their surroundings, including the Bedouins who assisted her husband.

At the Berlinische Galerie, Ashes and Broken Brickwork of a Logical Theory included six sub-series of old and new photographic artefacts, which confound the past with the present. (Bedouins) are reproductions of Christies pictures in both colour and black and white. (Tell) tell meaning in this case the mound formed by the remains of ancient settlements includes aerial shots of Mesopotamian excavation sites, taken by an unknown photographer in the 1930s. (Graves) and (Air) are colour images of Mallowans sites in the desert, which Kriemann photographed in Syria from the ground and from inside a plane respectively. (Baghdad Street) features her black and white photographs of Modernist apartment blocks built in the 1930s on the street of that name, in the Syrian capital Damaskus. (Prologue) are her colour images of a worn-out hardcover copy of the archaeologist Leonard Woolleys study Digging up the Past (1930). Apart from the Bedouins and the bustle of Damaskus, there are few people in the images which underscore the parched silence common to both deserts and books.

Modern Syria and the archaelogical search for ancient Mesopotamia provide a centre for the entire series, yet other historical-geographical facts connect the sub-series to each other. Mallowan was Woolleys assistant; Christie married him after meeting him at a dig; her novel Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) was inspired by Woolleys excavation of the ancient capital Ur in modern Iraq; the name of its capital resurfaces in (Baghdad Street). The predominance of the 1930s in Kriemanns set of references when Mallowan and Christie met, when the writer started taking archaeological photographs, when the anonymous (Tell) shots were taken, when the Damaskus apartment blocks were built, when Digging up the Past was published evokes a time capsule, if not a reconstruction of a bygone period.

In this exhibition, Kriemann the photographer, the collector of other peoples photographs and the excavator of other peoples digs had yet another surprising role, somewhere between curator and technician: dealing with the medium of the exhibition and issues of display. The artist added distinct physical elements not only to the photographs but also to the installation of the show at the Berlinische Galerie elements that created more palpable connections between the sub-series, beyond historical and geographical ones. In short, the photographs artefacts confounding the past and the present seemed to seep out of their frames and to take on another life for viewers wandering through the exhibition space.

In (Air) Kriemanns aerial photographs of the excavation sites the familiar curve of an aeroplane window turned up as a dark shadow at the edges of some prints. Most photographers would eliminate such mistakes, but the artist transformed her errors into a subtle three-dimensional feature of the installation. The curve of the aeroplane window became a kind of mini skateboard ramp, which Kriemann had moulded seamlessly in plaster in two places in the exhibition hall: first, under the shelf on which the Christie reproductions (Bedouins) were displayed; second, along the foot of the entire wall on which the (Baghdad Street) apartment block photographs and (Graves) were hung. The feature a cavetto recalls the curved white backgrounds in museum photographs of archaeological finds. But this passage  from a window in an aeroplane flying over Syria, to a dark shadow on a photographic print, to a white plaster cavetto in a Berlin gallery also juxtaposes the labour of archaeologists and photographers.

An archaeologist will gradually dig a ceramic shard out of the flat earth, eventually to unearth an entire pot. By contrast, a photographer begins with a three-dimensional reality that is flattened out in the photographic print and gradually developed in the darkroom (at least in the days before digitalization). Kriemann managed to exploit both practices. Ultimately, her exhibition wasnt merely about archaeology; it didnt simply mimic the practice by digging old photographs out of the archives or by making a pilgrimage to an excavation site; the exhibition also excavated its very own traces. Kriemann transformed the purely photographic effect of the shadow into the physical artefact of the cavetto, which photographers use as a background, precisely to avoid shadows. Ironically, Kriemanns cavetto disappeared once the exhibition was dismantled and survives only in pictures of the show.

Just as Kriemann transforms photographic mistakes into physical features in her installations, she also makes conspicuously faulty use of other photographic techniques and conventions. These errors emphasize not only the artificiality of the photograph but also its passage through a physical process and a three-dimensional realm, whether its the site where the picture was taken or the darkroom where it was developed. Often the passage is prolonged by a few extra stops. (Graves) the artists four landscape photographs of Mallowans excavation sites are tinted, respectively, in yellow, pink, purple-blue and green tones. The same four faint shades showed up not only in the overhead lighting in the exhibition hall but also on the pages of the exhibition catalogue Susanne Kriemann (2010). (Prologue) eight shots of Woolleys Digging up the Past features a photographic scale along the bottom of each shot, as if the book were a curious archaeological find whose dimensions required clarification.

The use of the scale may recall Christopher Williams work on cameras, colour charts and Kodak guides. Yet Kriemann seems interested in remembering that photographs have another very physical life as palpable objects: from the darkroom to the exhibition, from the archive to the book. Indeed, after I looked at Kriemanns publication list, I started to believe that she was a maker of books and took pictures on the side, just like Agatha Christie. Ashes and Broken Brickwork of a Logical Theory exists as a series of photographs, an ever-changing site-specific installation and the eponymous book published in 2010. 12 650 000 has appeared in book form twice: as the handy paperback 12650 (2008) and the heftier volume 12 650 000 (November 1941) (2008).

Other equally complex series take books as their point of departure. One Time One Million (2009) began with the Swedish camera inventor Victor Hasselblads ornithological picture book Flyttfågelstråk (The flight of migratory birds, 1935) and ended up linking migrating birds and military bombers. In 1940, a German spy plane crashed in Sweden; the only survivor was a surveillance camera, which Hasselblad reproduced in 1941 as the ROSS HK 7. In addition to reproducing Hasselblads bird shots, Kriemann took pictures of and with this rare historical camera as if looking through the viewfinder might bring her closer to Hasselblads experiences. Still not satisfied, the artist made her own aerial photographs of housing blocks on the outskirts of Stockholm, which were part of the Miljonprogrammet (Million Programme): a national project to build one million homes for one million workers throughout Sweden between 1965 and 1974. The series also includes her photographs of dead birds housed in the collection of Berlins natural history Museum für Naturkunde  a shift from the three-dimensional stuffed model to the flat documentary photograph. Of course, all of these sub-series ended up in the book One Time One Million (2009), which not only offers several views from above but also seems to embody them.

Kriemanns passion for photographs and books highlights what both mediums have in common: the tendency to fix things for good. Photographs and books maintain a direct relationship to death, like silent psychics that let us communicate with the past as image and language respectively. It is uncanny that both mediums are facing a certain death through digitalization. But Kriemanns goal is not to save dying technologies but rather to bring life to the flat world of pictures and printed pages. An element of the past lying dormant in photographs, books, archives or museum collections  is revived as a more palpable three-dimensional experience for us as viewers. The images of the Großbelastungskörper are repeated so often that we start to feel the weight of both the concrete cylinder and Nazi megalomania; like archaeologists, we discover the remnants of a shadow in a curved edge of the exhibition space; and we gain a new, morbid perspective of the birds eye view. Perhaps, in the end, Kriemann is a kind of trickster who pretends shes showing us the past but is really making us part of it.