In the CROSSOVER series, Berlin-based photo artist Thomas Nitz explores the feasibility and transgression of boundaries in depictive photography and explores them experimentally. It is no longer the photographic image that dominates, but the search for the means to create pictorial reality. Where the photographic is otherwise graded for the purpose of preserving the image, the actual content is the drawing in connection with the photographic image. With his work, Nitz poses the fundamental question of the value of the end product image.
Thomas Nitz moves between painting and photography. His shoots always begin with a drawing. He paints the models onto a 1.6 m x 1.6 m canvas using rough materials such as barbecue charcoal. Only then is the model placed in front of the drawing and exposed in a long exposure. The “Darkbox Camera” constructed by the photographer himself is used for this. The 100-year-old wooden camera with an attached darkroom at the back exposes paper negatives in 13 x 18 cm format, which can then be developed immediately. The result is visible just minutes after the picture is taken. Thomas Nitz prints the negatives using a contact process with liquid photo emulsion on self-coated cardboard. The special feature: The drawings made in advance are not kept and cataloged, they are destroyed after each session – they are simply painted over. What remains is only a negative, which reappears photographically as a “lost”.
The unique pieces created in this way refuse to be categorized; they act as objects. The people depicted merge with the drawing and show their presence as blurred shadows.
In the LOST and BRUT series, Thomas Nitz goes one step further into the experimental.
In LOST, the artist relies entirely on the reversal of values. He dissolves the boundaries between painting and photography. In times of infinite reproduction, he creates unique pieces and destroys preliminary drawings, only to leave them alive in the resulting photograph. For the photographs, he produces rough sketches that almost seem to have been created in a kind of manic drawing frenzy. They seem to have been taken from an overflowing drawing pad, filled with crudely painted sketches in a frenzied fit. Intoxication, eroticism, rage – the artist ultimately transports all of this into the photographs. After the sketches have been destroyed, the abundance of emotions remains in memory only as an image.
In BRUT, Nitz pushes the boundaries of aesthetics – and beyond. In a deliberate departure from conventional food photography, the photographer focuses on the pure, raw and rough. He crosses the boundary from the appetizing to the unappetizing and deliberately stages this. In this series, Thomas Nitz relies exclusively on large-format black-and-white photography and always photographs from above without any specific lighting. With this new form of expression, the artist takes food photography into an area beyond the pleasing, where not least the imagination wants to cross the border into disgust.