Don’t ask, just look
Conservator van het Fotomuseum Den Haag over Loretta Lux Den Haag, April 2005
Last year, I met Loretta Lux for the first time. It was at an exhibition of her work and our conversation was rudely interrupted by a couple who wanted to know what the artist had done to her photographs. They were photographs, weren’t they? Yes, they certainly were. “But what exactly have you done to them then? There’s something not quite right about them!” protested the husband, instantly losing patience. “I can’t tell you”, answered Lux with great decision, claiming her right as an artist ‘to remain silent’ to protect the secrets of her photographic trade, in much the same way as artists down the centuries have claimed the prerogative to be less than communicative with regard to the composition of their paint, the manufacturer of their canvases or the source of their marble.
The spontaneous response of the couple is to some extent understandable, however misguided their interest may have appeared to Lux. Since the emergence of digitally created and manipulated photographic images – common in the work of photographers, visual artists and the advertising design world for the last decade – it has been impossible to rely on photographs to be always and incontestably faithful representations of the real world. For many people, the unreliability of the photographic image is now axiomatic. We have entered the era of ‘artificial photography’ and we have to adjust to the fact.
In 2002, when I exhibited Paul Ruigrok’s monumental photograph of a lavishly tattooed baby in my museum, many visitors responded with incomprehension, anger and disgust. What kind of parents would do such a thing to an innocent baby? If I told them that the photographer had created the image by working for three months on the computer to produce a single photograph using material from a hundred separate shots – for example, the head and body were actually those of two different infants – and that the tattoos had been skilfully rendered onto the baby’s back, their rejection swiftly turned into admiration and they exclaimed in excited wonder “To think that photography can produce such literally fantastic images!”
Where this kind of over-the-top example of digital manipulation is concerned, especially one created for purposes of advertising, I am prepared to give away such ‘trade secrets’. Technically, Loretta Lux uses much the same procedures as Paul Ruigrok. Even so, it would be a pity to explain them to visitors, particularly because her digital interventions are far more subtle and stand in a pleasingly provocative relationship to the non-fictional visual eloquence of her chosen child-models. The children she uses for her portraits are invariably pleased with the final result, even if they are not always depicted in a ‘true-to-life’ way. The hidden strength of Lux’s work lies in its meticulous balance between fact and fiction, or – in other words – its amalgam of traditional photography with still more traditional painterly techniques. Lux’s background as a trained painter, who happens to dislike the smell and tactile sensation of oil on canvas but otherwise feels herself indebted to all the established formal techniques of the discipline, has led her to conduct new experiments in painting, which are in fact ‘only’ fictional photographic images generated by the artist’s imagination and constructed with the help of digital techniques.
Loretta Lux (b. Dresden, 1969) started to produce her painterly photographs as recently as 1999. The first was a self-portrait. Since then, she has portrayed only children: children who appeal to her, frequently the offspring of friends. The images she produces are graceful and serene, but at the same time have something disquieting and disconcerting about them. Lux: “The pictures are not portraits in the traditional meaning of the word. I call them imaginary portraits. They are not really about the children that I photographed. I rather made them my own.” Loretta Lux’s trade secrets are an integral part of her photographs. Don’t ask. Just look.
The Hague, April 2005
Wim van Sinderen
Curator - Hague Museum of Photography
Loretta Lux - The Bride, 2003, Ilfochrome, 51 x 51 cm. © Loretta Lux, courtesy Torch Gallery Amsterdam / Yossi Milo Gallery New York