Martin Klimas - Fotografie

Birds

Edition of 5

2006

The photographs of birds of prey are selfies in the broadest sense. As soon as they have taken flight, the birds pass through a light beam sensor, effectively snapping their own pictures. Klimas shows them in a perfect paradox: although these images are captured at the moment of ultimate physical tension, the subjects appear strangely still and lifeless against the stark, grey background. By liberating the birds from the transfiguring natural surroundings to which they are normally confined, Klimas makes a break with our visual habits. When the setting is eliminated, our attention is directed at the birds themselves. Completely detached from any context, they appear larger than life and almost a little surreal.

Installation View 100 cm x 170 cm, Untitled, 2006, Ed of 5

Alfred-Ehrhardt-Stiftung, Berlin

05.07.2014 - 14.09.2014

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Wild

Animals in Contemporary Photography
Groupshow 14.7.2012 - 8.9.2012
The Moving Gallery, Omaha

Wild, organic, natural, dangerous, cute: these are terms we rely on to describe animals, their character, and how we relate to them. In "Wild: Animals in Contemporary Photography," on display this summer at Moving Gallery in Omaha and traveling around Europe this fall, seventeen artists examine the ways society uses, imagines, fetishizes and fantasizes about animals through photography....

The work that best fits the title of the show "Wild" is "Eagles" (2006) from Martin Klimas, a series of three large-format eagles, captured in flight, against a grey studio wall. The photographs are minutely detailed, leaving the viewer to conclude how such ambitious images could be captured. The viewer must decide whether they are real or fake, alive or dead, in motion or frozen, and the images call into question the authority of photography itself.