MADE IN GERMANY

15 Philine von Sell’s photography project Made in Germany depicts moments, situations, and impressions of the world of labor in German industry. The artist sought out ten renowned German firms and visited their production sites, all over the country. Her photographs show manufacturing and production processes from a dispassionate perspective that recognizes the essential and the exceptional in the seemingly normal and routinized. The project includes works created between 2006 and 2008 that depict mechanized and manual labor, as well as the on-site transformation of raw material into final product. All of this results from the artist-photographer’s perception and activity, unfolding and carefully examining an object of inquiry. The photographs in this volume are taken with a 4.5 x 6 cm medium- format Pentax camera. The project is not finished, and Philine von Sell has plans to continue with it. Made in Germany emphasizes the documentary aspects of viewing the modern reality of production. This series gives an observer the impression that the photographer discovered in the world of labor a succession of new and utterly surprising per spectives. It seems that a world opened up to the artist, one that amazed her with its complexity, precision, and efficiency. The photographer’s works present the very different production realities that she experienced—to which she devoted her own fresh gaze, in the form of a vision that shows great respect for the processes of labor and manufacturing. The photographs show the specific characteristics of each industrial operation. In the manufacture of goods as various as ceramics, screws, and food products, it is clear that both raw materials and their processing will exert an influence over the immediate environment. The production sites of Dr. Oetker, Bausch Decor, Falke, Rectus, Würth, Eternit, the banknote print ers Giesecke & Devrient, and other leading German companies are characterized both by the materials they use and by the technological and artisanal demands of the production, sorting, and storage of their high-quality goods. In this way, each firm possesses something exceptional, something unmistakably its own. Each manufacturing process, work bench, and workplace has something distinctive, as does each organizational system (or lack thereof), and, needless to say, each production site’s architecture. The photographs that Philine von Sell produced for Made in Germany are as various as the products and their manufactur ing. This is because she immersed herself in a new situation at each new firm, developing an appropriate form of viewing for each new situation: For example, the photograph entitled Zahlen (Numbers), made in a Villeroy & Boch factory (ill. p. 87), shows ceramic products arranged in pallets awaiting finishing. This photograph presents interim storage as an organizational process: the composition is a frontal view, with a balance be tween the horizontal and the vertical that emphasizes the serial aspect of manufacturing. In contrast to the production of colored pencils, for example, the objects here stand in rank and file, set apart from one another by precise, repeating distances. In addi tion, the production process dictates that the batches be labeled with reference numbers comprehensible only to the “initiated.” A brief look back: in the years since the mid-1920s, modern photography has often been concerned with photographing and conceptualizing the world of industry and production. Industrial photography, industrial reportage, and so-called objective and material photography allowed for dramatic new insights into the modern world, into its technological reality and its productive specificity. Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897–1966) gained promi nence through his photography and photo books, such as the volume Die Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful, 1928), in which he displayed structural similarities between nature and modern technology and parallels between biologically evolved and technologically constructed reality. Renger-Patzsch did not regard photography as an art. Instead, he spoke in his theoreti cal writings of “photographic handicraft” and argued for the unity of method and means. His “objective photographs,” drawn from his ideas on the tasks of the medium, were revolutionary within the emerging field of “artistic photography.”1 Certain of Philine von Sell’s images seem to occupy a bor derland between the real and the surreal, in particular those works that evoke conceptions that go beyond the actual product. Among this group is a photo shot from above showing the sur face of a red table, atop which is a metal bucket bearing traces of green pigment (ill. p. 42). The bucket is a tool used at Faber- Castell to scoop pigment out of bins. Against the deep red back ground of the tabletop, the subject appears as a form that has been utterly reduced—like an idol from another culture, or a modern sculpture. Such observations bear witness to the artist’s precise perception of reality, which she uses to discover exceptional things in the everyday. This approach to photography is ulti- mately also the reason why Philine von Sell only infrequently shows people at work: her main interest lies in the broader context, the atmosphere of the factories. Though people rarely enter into such images of production, the photos often contain traces of their existence and activities. THOUGHTS ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF PHILINE VON SELL PETER FUNKEN

MADE IN GERMANY

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