ART IN AMERICA
Wolfram Hahn at C/O
Unspectacular at first, Wolfram Hahn‘s half length photographic portraits of 13 children and adolescents manifest a dark, abysmal brilliance at second glance. The motionless protagonists, aged three to 12 and apparently from middle-class backgrounds, are set off from a neutral, monochromatic background so that the viewer automatically focuses on their faces. They do not look into the camera but rather stare straight ahaid or down with apathetic expressions. Given what they are doing, this lack of emotion is surprising: They are watching TV, and we are watching the television drain them of any sense of enchantment with the world. We don‘t know their names or what they are watching.
It‘s not only since media theorist Neil Postman‘s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which the artist cites on his Web site, that we have been familiar with the dark site of contemporary mediascape. For his part, Hahn seems simply fascinated by the children‘s unconditional surrender to the TV.
Hahn produced this series, “A Disenchanted Playroom,” in 2006. The young Berlin photographer used a Hasselblad middle-format camera to photograph his subjects from a slightly elevated position. On a formal level, the composition of the images is conventional, in the art-historical tradition of the half-length portrait. In an interview printed in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Hahn names his influences in the portrait genre: Rembrandt, Richard Avedon, and Rineke Dijkstra.
A revealing comparison can be made with Jeff Wall‘s staged family portrait Movie Audience (1979). In it, Wall subtly and indirectly shows what is happening in the film, though it is not visible to the viewer, via an expression of promise in the faces of the parents and their small son–an affirmation, perhaps, of the medium of film. In Hahn‘s work, we are confronted with captively attentive, solitary children under the influence of the media.
At C/O several exhibition projects are always concurrently on view. One of the shows running along with Hahn‘s was of the work of young Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene, who portrays puberty as a state of uncertainty. These young people, too–often girls on the threshold of adulthood, some already pregnant–are portrayed with both tenderness and a sense of drama. It is as if the children in Hahn‘s images had grown a few years older in van Meene‘s photographs.
Text: Matthias Harder, October 2007
