| | | |  | | | | Roger Humbert: Untitled (Colour Photograph), 1972, Fine Art Print (2021), 19 x 19 cm | | | | | | The Language of Light | | | | 28 August – 19 September 2021 | | | | Opening: Saturday, 28 August, 12 – 5pm | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | Roger Humbert: Untitled (Photogram), 1961, Photogram on Baryt paper, 24 x 24 cm | | | | | | Concrete Photography strives for a pure photography that focuses only on itself and is detached from iconography and symbolism. Swiss photographer Roger Humbert, born in Basel in 1929, is a pioneer of Concrete Photography and has produced an extensive body of work from the 1950s to the present day. The exhibition "The Language of Light" presents the wide-ranging oeuvre of Humbert and elaborates the history of the development of Concrete Photography. This comprehensive look focuses on five groups of works: analog Photograms, analog Colour Photographs, digital Photograms and Concrete Photography, digital Color Reflections and Spectral Photographs.
Based on the theories of the English photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn around 1916, concrete photography concentrates on the mysterious quality of light. Further stations in the history of development are the well-known Schadographs by Christian Schad, the Rayographs by Man Ray, and the photograms, luminograms, and photomontages by László Moholy-Nagy taken at the Bauhaus.
Roger Humbert began creating photograms in the darkroom in the mid-1950s. Humbert and his photographic contemporaries were looking for a new modern, experimental visual language - a photography without a camera. He denied the image, detached himself from the object and understood light as a decisive, image-generating element. Using experimental light sources and form elements, Humbert created photograms from the 1950s to the 2000s. The art and literature historian Bernd Stiegler compares in the publication concrete photography as program Humbert's work in the darkroom with that of a natural scientist. In the laboratory, Humbert carried out scientific experiments with photography and tried to find out what it meant to capture light photographically by using form elements such as stencils, grids and punch cards. | | | | | |  | | | | Roger Humbert: Untitled (Colour Photograph), 1972, Fine Art Print (2021), 19 x 19 cm | | | | | | In the abstract colour photographs of 1972, Roger Humbert placed Plexiglas elements on a glass plate, let colored light shine on the plates from below, and took analog photographs of the abstract color composites with a Hasselblad 6x6. Humbert exhibited these works only once in the 1970s. After 50 years, these images are shown again on occasion of exhibition The Language of Light.
In recent years, Humbert has transferred his work in the darkroom to the digital image space, creating digital Concrete Photographs. Like its analog predecessors, the focus lies on the mysterious quality of light. This is now being explored using new, digital photographic techniques. | | | | | |  | | | Roger Humbert: Untitled (Concrete Photography, digital), 2008
Fine Art Print, 18 x 13 cm | | | | | | Humbert then continued to work with spectral photography. The term and the meaning are functionally a connection with the sunlight and an optical bench with a prism placed at the end. Spectral Photographs, which are also taken digitally, are complex in processing. When a white beam of sunlight passes through a convex lens and other transparent geometric objects, the light beam is directed to the prism and is deflected, at the same time decomposed into the colors that are visible to our eyes.
In our time, digitalization once again challenges photography and Roger Humbert turns to precisely this difficult question. For Humbert, photography is still a "field of perception at the back of the visual space", which he formulates with different photographical techniques and clearly demonstrates how the use of elementary photographic together with a subjective creative power can open up new paths in contemporary art. For Roger Humbert, the exploration and research of light has been at the center of his work until today. | | | | | |  | | | | Roger Humbert: Untitled (Spectral Photography), 2013, Fine Art Print, 18,5 x 26,5 cm | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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