About Franz Kafka — and a few photographers

Peo­ple often tend to cat­e­go­rize the work of pho­tog­ra­phers, there are “street pho­tog­ra­phers”, “fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phers”, “archi­tec­ture pho­tog­ra­phers”. I’m not sure what I am. Some­times I call myself an urban pho­tog­ra­ph­er, but that’s not real­ly a genre, it’s just say­ing, that most of my pho­tog­ra­phy is made in cities. My pho­tog­ra­phy is a game, or a role play, some­where placed between arts and real­i­ty – with an art­work that ide­al­ly lures the view­er into a realm of untold sto­ries. And what the view­er might dis­cov­er by enter­ing this realm, is a lit­tle bit about peo­ple and their rela­tion­ships to each oth­er, a lit­tle bit about arts and per­cep­tion, a lit­tle bit about the world and how we see the world – but fore­most I hope that the view­er learns a lot about him­self and about his own rela­tion to the world, and about his own per­cep­tion of the world. I see the view­er as the defin­ing, the cru­cial ele­ment of arts. It’s the view­er with all his expe­ri­ences, all his sub­jec­tiv­i­ty that per­ceives my work of art, no one else. The artist alone is no one. The art­work begins to exist in the recip­i­ent.

I’m some­how influ­enced by the clas­sic French and Amer­i­can street pho­tog­ra­phers, such as Carti­er-Bres­son, Kertesz, Wino­grand, Erwitt and Fried­lan­der, although I usu­al­ly do not call myself a street pho­tog­ra­ph­er. And so I think that the biggest influ­ence does not come from those street pho­tog­ra­phers but from the Amer­i­can col­or pho­tog­ra­phers main­ly from the fifties and six­ties, names as Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggle­ston, Louis Fau­r­er and Saul Leit­er. Many of my pho­tographs are in col­or and it’s main­ly the work of Leit­er that told me a lot about com­pos­ing pic­tures with col­ors, and with a big vari­ety of unusu­al per­spec­tives. And it’s Leiter’s work with unsharp­ness, his work with bokeh and his unusu­al choic­es of where to put the focal point that influ­enced my way of look­ing at pho­tographs.

But if I had to name an artist that influ­enced my pho­tog­ra­phy most I would sur­pris­ing­ly name a writer: Franz Kaf­ka. It’s his dark sense of humour, his mys­te­ri­ous way of telling absurd sto­ries that I’m feel­ing to be very close to with my nar­ra­tive pho­tog­ra­phy. Kafka’s sto­ries, my favourite one is ‘The Tri­al’, always live from the gaps, from the unan­swered ques­tions, the unsolved, unsolv­able rid­dles. Some­one once said that pho­tog­ra­phy is like paint­ing with light. I do not agree with that. For me it’s the absence of light – dark­ness and shad­ows – and the absence of expla­na­tions, solu­tions, that cre­ates the nar­ra­tiv­i­ty of my pho­tographs. It’s the ten­den­cy of the view­er to fill in those gaps, to solve those rid­dles, to answer those ques­tions that is start­ing the sto­ries, in the fan­ta­sy and in the imag­i­na­tion of the view­er.

Jür­gen Bür­gin (2014)