Geheimer Winkel

gelatin silver print mounted on cardboard

Josef Breitenbach composes the image by focusing on a mundane everyday object, a delicate iron chair. It is empty, yet present – as an invitation or a question. Next to it is Pan, covered in ivy. The scene is not staged, but discovered: a corner that lives up to its name Geheimer Winkel (Secret corner) – hidden, unobserved, almost overlooked.
Light and shadow are what decisively shape the image. Sunbeams filter through the leaves of a tree and draw a moving pattern in the picture. The light not only models things, it also obscures them. The shadows of the leaves appear like fleeting projections, as if nature were photographing along with the artist, as if time were visible.
Breitenbach finds a visual language for the delicate, the fleeting. He is not interested in the spectacular, but in what lies in between: in what light writes on surfaces and in what eludes it. Breitenbach's Geheimer Winkel is not a quiet idyll, but a photographic poem about presence and absence, about light as a sign of time.
(Christoph Fuchs)