untitled

negative processing, gelatin silver print on warm-toned paper (Kodak Ektalure)

signed, dated, numbered (pencil) on recto

As a visual artist, I work with the medium of analog photography. I capture moments from life in order to recreate them later as photographic works. Often, however, the invisible elements and atmosphere are lost between the moment of capture and the final reproduction. My goal, however, is to show precisely this. If what I experienced is not visible in the finished print, I process the images using a wide variety of analog techniques with the aim of making my experience visible to the viewer.
This becomes very clear in the series Altrhein (Old Rhine) My intention was not to photograph landscapes along the Altrhein, but rather to capture in images the metamorphosis of the patches of land repeatedly flooded by high water. In the series, I applied the processes of nature to my working methodology, thereby making the impression I experienced visible. It was the first work in which I so consistently determined the image’s message through interventions in the photographic process.
After developing the analog black-and-white negatives, I felt something was missing. The images had become disconnected from the experience itself. To reconnect my lived impressions with the images, I decided to rewind the 9x12 negatives onto the development spools and submerge them in the waters of the Old Rhine. By exposing the film to the river water in this way, nature was able to take possession of the film material and leave its mark on it. After a certain period of time, I removed the negatives and saw various deposits on them that had dried in the sunlight over several days. With nature’s help, "photograms" had been created that show the deposits on the negatives and appear on the positive prints as sunspots and crystals.
(Ralf Cohen, translated by deepL)

Images of Time
Ralf Cohen brings photography from "l’instant décisif" to "nunc stans"

[…] The photographic artist, Ralf Cohen from Karlsruhe (Germany) was never convinced by the apparent certainties regarding time, space and pictures. Cohen illustrates these doubts within old metaphors in images of water and rivers. Cohen produced several images of the Old Rhine area near Karlsruhe, in 1994. Black and white residues of time, sized 9x12 cm. These first old Rhine photographs might be regarded as snapshots. They were destroyed later. Cohen wanted them to hold on to the rise and fall of the water, the sediments that the river brought with it and the dregs it carried away. But, the artist was not satisfied with his first prints. Was that really what he had seen at the river bank? Shadows in the reeds? Decaying branches in the riverside sludge? Reflections in the shallow water? Ralf Cohen was not content with the initial results. He destroyed these prints and returned to the river with the negatives.
At the riverbank he placed the reel of negatives in the water. This was how a new time was written into the old images – time lasting for hours. When Cohen finally took his negatives back out of the water the line of time had changed. The "Pencil of Nature", according to William Henry Fox Talbot, 1846, had widened during those hours. The pencil in Cohen’s images was not drawing with sunlight alone any more. It was drawing with fluvial sediments, with everything that the Rhine was carrying.
Cohen exposed the negatives later – first of all sized 100x153 cm on silver gelatin baryta photo paper, afterwards sized 40x55 cm on Kodak ektalure warm tone paper. The first series was forgotten about, rolled up in the archive. He called the 2^nd series Altrhein. It was not until 2011 that Cohen remembered about the large format baryta paper prints. He converted his Altrhein (Old Rhine) prints once more. This time, he gradually removed the gelatin from the prints, transforming the images one last time. This time the transformation was an active interference with the original. The results were unique. Ralf Cohen
called them NEULAND (Unknown Territory).
This NEULAND series fundamentally refuses to obey the rules of photography. Time is not the frozen subject of a photograph. Time is a process which has penetrated photography. Photographs, are not "instants décisifs". For Ralf Cohen they are layers and residues of a lengthy transformation process. Photography means change for Cohen: The world undergoes a radical change during the process of exposure, developing and fixation, modifying and experimenting. Cohen’s images are no longer visions of that reality which appeared to the artist at a certain moment of time. They manifest a dimension above time: An observation that spreads over all moments. The river that moved within time becomes abstract. It is detached from time. It is not "that’s the way it was" that determines these pictures, but archetypal seeing and grasping.
Water and the elements always played a central role in Ralf Cohen’s pictures. A series of compositions such as Wasserströmung (Current) 2001, or weisser Atlantik (White Atlantic) and schwarzer Pazifik (Black Pacific), created in 2008 bear witness to Ralf Cohen’s fascination for eternity, reflected in the infinite space of oceans. 20 years earlier, the Japanese photographic artist Hiroshi Sugimoto was the first to create a series of photos expressing an experience of time, stretching out far beyond all moments into eternity. Sugimoto’s pictures showed nothing but a horizon line, dividing the sky and sea into two parts: Seascapes – a primal mythical experience. A glimpse of creation on the second day: "And God said: Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters." (Gen.1:6–8). Sugimoto’s Seascapes were his way of breaking out of that photographic causal experience in which moments are lined up in a row, wandering through yesterday, today and tomorrow. Past and future no longer exist in Sugimoto’s pictures – only one single eternity. One static now, stretching relentlessly over space and time. There never was an "instant décisif" in this reality. Tomorrow is past and everything to come has already happened. Cohen’s water images reflect this type of experience lying dormant deep the realms of our sub-consciousness – like a side stream to Heraclite’s "Panta rhei".
In Conslolation Philosophaiae Boethius, the late antique philosopher wrote: "The now that passes produces time. The now that remains produces eternity". "Nunc stans", the "eternal now", which was always visible in Cohen’s pictures.
(Ralf Hanselle, from: Ralf Cohen, Synthese. Fotoarbeiten 1972 bis 2019, exh. cat. Städtischen Galerie Fruchthalle Rastatt 2019, p.123, complete text PDF)