Passersby (series)

2001 - 2011

Pigmentprints on Dibond

That which Jean Gebser wrote in "The anti-perspective world" about cubism is relevant in a similar manner to Egbert Mittelstädt‘s photographs: "... that which at the first glance appears as distortion ... becomes a self-supplementing overlapping of temporal factors and spatial sectors through the risk of banishing them at the same time and in the same space onto one surface of a picture. In such a manner, that which is represented receives that concrete character of uniqueness and the present that is not nourished by a demand for beauty, emphasized by the soul, but which lives from the concretisation of time."

Man and his movement form the focal point of Egbert Mittelstädt‘s oeuvre. Dealing with the media recording of appearance and movement distanced him from work to work such as, e.g. Elsewhere and Time Machine from a "realistic" portrayal. Instead, it increasingly becomes his matter of concern to examine the process of photography and the technical grounds for a realistic or aesthetic photographic image.

This extended artistic view is made possible because he constantly exposes the film with an open shutter. Passersby is a series of (analogue) photographic works based on the slit-scan technique. In this technique, spatial conditions are compressed to coloured stripes, where only the movements are recorded by the camera in concrete form onto the film. This creates tension between blurring and image, defined and abstract elements of the picture.

(from the Catalog „European Media Art Festival“, Osnabruek 2005)