Ludwig Seyfarth

All Images are moving

“Moving images” is a collective term for all image media in which images move in time before our eyes. The distinction between individual media is increasingly being called into question - in the face of ever-increasing digital image production and processing.

Gudrun Kemsa not only blurs the boundaries between image media, but also between static and moving images. In addition to photographs that depict street scenes in various metropolises in sharp detail, for example, she also creates photographs in which the artist moves the camera very quickly along the subject. This results in blurring, like the rapid movement of a paintbrush across a canvas. Isn’t the result of moving the camera also a “moving image”? And aren’t there also static images in film? In Stanley Kubrick’s film “Barry Lindon”, for example, the film sets are staged in the style of historical painting styles. Slow movements through landscape panoramas make the camera appear like an eye moving slowly over a painting.

Approaches to painting can also be found again and again in the history of photography, especially around 1900. Blurring and out-of-focus effects like those in the first photographs, which could later be avoided by using shorter exposure times, were now deliberately used to imitate the light effects found in Impressionist paintings.

One could see Gudrun Kemsa’s blurred landscapes in this tradition, but instead of a stylistic approximation to the guidelines of painting, the boundary to the moving video image becomes fluid. For Kemsa’s “Moving Images” are also video films in which similarly blurred motifs as in the photographs can be seen in motion.

Are there any images at all that are not based on movement? After all, every painted picture, every drawing and every photograph is based on a temporal process that is, as it were, stored in the picture. This can be very short or very long, such as the time span of the photographic exposure. Some of what we see in Gudrun Kemsa’s pictures, which are the result of split-second movements, is reminiscent in its blurriness of inscriptions of light, such as those that emerged during Michael Wesely’s long exposures, which lasted up to two years. “Marked out”? One of the pioneers of photography, Henry Fox Talbot, called it the “pencil of
nature”: instead of the human hand, nature itself guides the pencil. Gudrun Kemsa turns the camera into a pencil and a brush. In this way, she takes the pencil of nature into her own hands.

in: Floating Spaces - Gudrun Kemsa, Verlag Kettler, Dortmund, 2024, S.125.