Julia Baier & Andreas Trogisch: fast/fast

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A space where the perfect shot or the right moment are not the priority, but where an aimless shutter release, coincidental creations and the beauty of failure are celebrated.

Their works both evolve around a play with the simultaneous over- and underload of their technical devices. For Julia Baier’s series “Northern Drifting”, it is the unorthodox use of the smartphone panorama feature. For Andreas Trogisch’s “Pinakothek”, it is the refusal to use an appropriate lens for his digital camera. The doubling of the word “fast” in the title hints at its various meanings in German and English: on the one hand, it plays on Julia Baier’s Icelandic landscapes swiftly flying past the viewer’s eye. On the other hand, it alludes to the almost-in-focus-ness of Andreas Trogisch’s pictures – not to mention the barely successful panorama shots. “Fast” hence becomes the opposite of “fast”: any quick momentariness is banned from the pictures as none of the shots have been exposed for less than half a second, some even more than a minute, hence they are only “almost” momentary. The lack of color is yet another self-imposed chicanery the two photographers accept willingly, because they know that the range from black to white is the universal color spectrum of photografical poetry.