The ILFORD-project (is developing)

The ILFORD-project departs from the conceptual idea of connecting two places that are themselves related to photography: the London borough Ilford, eponym and former home of the well known producer of analogue photographic materials ILFORD and the photo studio of the Austrian federal art and culture department, located in the East End of London. The concept was to use the bus route 25, which passes by both of the two sites, in order to connect them out of the physical experience of the bus ride and further, to investigate Ilford and to visit the places where the company's history had started around 1879, now 140 year ago.

The Ilford-project investigates the early days of photography industry in order to examine the manifestation of analogue image materiality by transferring them into hybrid and digital image processing structures and also takes a takes a critical look on the volatility of photographic images in the age of digital/virtual image overload by advocating the temporal and material qualities of the physical manifestation of photographic images.

Furthermore, it provokes a confrontation between different realities: of the brand name ILFORD with its namesake place, of the now with the past, but also a confrontation of a thought-up concept with the twists and turns of an artistic process. From this point of view, The Ilford-project is both a documentation of a photographic research and of the process of creating an art piece - a documentation of how an art work develops and finds both content and form, mapping the path from the theoretical concept to an abstracted imagination, the path from the field of investigation to the studio. The final art piece, its working process and its documentation merge into one body.

The Ilford-project consists of many parts that test and intertwine different common modes of documentary strategies and narratives. The range includes historic and scientific imagery, methods of writing like descriptive reports and personal diary entries which appear in the video work, juxtapositions of still images and moving image but also investigations of the temporal aspects of color and b/w-footage as seen in the photo book as well as in the video. Here I'm particularily interested in two core aspect of photography, on one hand its function of recording and capturing in order to get a hold of things and on the other hand its literal connection to time in general and in particular the moment as a significant point of decision making.