M HKA Ensembles

Installation, variable dimensions.

Collection: Courtesy of the artist.

Working reflexively with photographic and camera technology, Katrin Kamrau investigates how the technical image functions as a reflection of society and the media. Particular schemas used for image colour charts in a publication by the Eastman Kodak Company named The Joy of Photography forms the basis of these photographic installations by Kamrau. They visualised what impact the varying gradations of colour filters had on printed image material when photography was still analogue. The sets of images – portraits of young women – were used by laboratory technicians to produce ‘colour neutral’ photographic prints as efficiently as possible. In both installations SPEKTRUM*objekt18(portrait) and SPEKTRUM*objekt18(portrait) II, these schemas have been enlarged and turned into constellations of possible images across a spectrum. Kamrau asks to what extent these constructs, including their representations of people, express a Western normative mode of thinking by those involved in the production process of such a manual. Rather than possessing one fixed perspective, these works can also be seen to point towards an image of truth that is more multifaceted and relative.