Miriam Böhm
Berlin Wentrup
9783942405928
80 pages
Distanz Verlag Gmbh Llc
Overview
Miriam Böhm (born 1972, lives and works in Berlin) arranges, layers, and shoots mounted prints that produce a series of disorienting shifts. Her photographs contain pictures within pictures, upsetting relationships between figure and ground, real and reproduced. Operating under an internal logic of repositioning and flipping, her carefully constructed images force the viewer into a different kind of looking in an attempt to pin down the image, one that regards each layer of the photograph as a physical entity. A close search for clues within and among pictures becomes an attempt to ground oneself within the work. The viewer’s relationship to the original image is similarly altered, as any reference it may carry is caught up in Böhm‘s formal plays. Her source material feels deceptively offhand, ranging from fauxpainted marble textures to rows of trees, wrapped pictures and packing materials, and office supply sets. But these common materials, and the drab fabric she often employs as a background, achieve an unexpected aesthetic dynamism under her formal operations. Within the series, it is the basic elements of pictorial illusion themselves and how we read them photographically that are set in tension. Printing and reprinting, for Böhm, are not only central to her process but written into the image, enacting and revealing a physical relationship with photography. First book on the artist with a text by Matthew Thompson.
