Adam Fuss

Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris and Cologne
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Among the more interesting artists currently working in the field of photography, Adam Fuss is noteworthy for his particular interest in early photographic techniques, which he skillfully employs to obtain images of unequalled expressivity. English-born Fuss initially devoted his energies to experiments with the stenoscope and the Daguerreotype.

Based in New York for the last twenty years, however, since the mid-’80s the artist has principally been working with the photogram: without the use of a camera, he transfers an image by laying the subject directly onto photographic paper. This type of procedure was employed in the nineteenth century by William Fox Talbot and Hippolyte Bayard and picked up again, with a specifically artistic application, by Man Ray and Laszló Moholy-Nagy.

In contrast to his predecessors, however, Fuss draws on the technique to render the less material aspects of reality visible. Printed with great skill, Fuss’s large-scale images succeed in capturing the “ghostly” or spiritual essence of virtually incorporeal objects—wisps of smoke in the air, the beating wings of a bird in flight, the diaphanous delicacy of old christening robes.

These last form the subjects of the photos on show in the My Ghost exhibit in Paris: no simple black-and-white images, Fuss’s works are enhanced by infinite shades of gray and silvery glints. Floating like translucent jellyfish in the murky depths, the tiny garments are laden with a macabre valence that creates a fascinating, if unsettling, dialogue between birth and death.

In Cologne, the Photograms exhibit is host to a series of works issued as unique prints on cibachrome paper. All the images are related to the theme of “Spirals,” tracing the path of a lamp hung above the photographic paper and left to gyrate and swing as if it were a pendulum. The effect of these ever-decreasing circles of luminous oval impressions is hypnotic, evoking an illusion of infinity, and recalling, in certain aspects, Marcel Duchamp’s Rotorelief works.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Rosalind Furness