Peter Brandes at DCA - Brief Article

Art in America, July, 2001 by Michael Amy

The 78 silver prints (all 9 1/2 by 12 inches and produced between 1986 and 2000) in "Past III," Peter Brandes's recent exhibition, presented the Danish artist's meditations on culture, power, time and memory. All four themes are implicit in the ancient Egyptian and Greek ruins and sculptures which Brandes photographs, and are underscored by the way in which he handles the medium.

Brandes emphasizes the photographer's individual vision by creating unique prints. He uses prolonged exposures--from one to 10 seconds--and unusually slow films, shooting with a handheld camera. The occasional movements of his body are communicated to the images, which are consequently blurred. Atmospheric qualities are augmented in the darkroom by brushing alternatively weaker or stronger developer onto the images. The resulting painterly effects evoke old-master canvases as well as introductory chapters in the history of photography. Significantly, some early photographers considered the visual preservation of antiquity to be among the new medium's more elevated tasks.

In one of several photos titled Kouros, 6th Century B.C. (1995), the Archaic Greek statue of a standing nude youth at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is viewed slightly from the left and framed so that the head and torso fill the right half of the vertical composition. The splendidly schematized figure is shown from a vantage point that allows the contour of his right arm to reinforce the silhouette of the tall Attic stele behind. Streaks of dark brown along the vertical margins of the photograph create an atmosphere from which the kouros dramatically emerges.

Vitality is likewise conveyed by the phallic morphology and upright surge of the fragmentary kouros at Olympia (2000), shot in profile and appearing dark brown against a radiant background. However, many of Brandes's photographs speak of death, loss and isolation. Witness, for example, the doubled images of a statue of Akhenaten in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin (2000), each pair showing slightly different views of the damaged head. The coupled images are separated by a black bar and surrounded by darkness, as if they belonged to sacrificial victims and had been squeezed into boxes.

These relics of the past are emotionally moving, visually gratifying and intellectually challenging for all who are concerned with the roots of the Western tradition. Brandes's photographic re-presentations of the fragments reward the viewer on as many levels.