THE MAGIC OF THE EVERYDAY · MARGIT HART’S SCHATTENFLÜGE

Nina Schedlmayer

In his 1916 essay ‹The Future of Pictorial Photography› the photographer Alvin Landon Coburn proposed putting on an exhibition titled Abstract Photography. Such an exhibition would exclude any work in which «the interest of the subject-matter is greater than the appreciation of the extraordinary.»¹
Since that time the idea of the abstract has gained a foothold in photography. A whole range of artists, from Wolfgang Tillmans to Shirine Gill to Inge Dick, has identified the medium’s inherent capacity to be representational and documentary. A decade and a half ago, photography expert Ruth Horak recognized exactly this tendency in photography, referring to it as ‹new reductionism.› She writes «the essence of the shift from conceptual art to new reductionism is that the idea is no longer put ahead of the creative process. Instead primacy is given to the development of a standalone image that asserts its independence from the representational capacity of photography. The specific object vanishes.»²
In Coburn’s imaginary exhibition, which he himself never brought to fruition, there would certainly have been a place for Margit Hart’s Schattenflug series. In this collection of carefully printed photographic works, built up since 2009, the shadows not only fly but also dance and dissolve into one another. Are those droplets of ink mixed into water? Or is it an illusion? Are those scratches that have been made on the negative? Or is it a curl of smoke blown into a bright room? Are the dark prints images from shoeboxes with holes cut in them? And how is it that, just in very specific places, rainbow colors appear?
Looking at Margit Hart’s compositions for the first time, it is not at all clear how they have been created. The specific object is no longer present. As Horak writes in her essay, in abstract photography its place is always taken by «a new constructed reality, that exists in the moment, in its own right.»³ In fact Margit Hart’s images are made by the reflections that appear on a surface when the artist holds a glass above it in a very particular way. We see just the traces that appear when light shines through the glass. Over the years the artist has further developed this technique. She has long since become an expert in choosing the glass best suited to her purpose, identifying the light conditions that will create the most interesting effects, and knowing when the sun is best positioned to elicit the richest compositions. In the words of László Moholy-Nagy, one of the first to engage with light and shade in photography and film, this approach corresponds not to the ‹photogenic› but to the ‹photo-creative› mind: «He will not only select what he finds but he will produce situations, introduce devices so far unused and neglected, which for him contain the necessary qualities of photographic expression.»⁴
The compositions stand for themselves; they are imaginary worlds in which viewers can immerse themselves. They create spaces which could be any size imaginable. Each picture has a particular dynamic, a particular atmosphere: in one, circular swirls appear (a multitude of tornados?), elsewhere a diagonal line stretches across the surface of the picture (an aeroplane in slow motion). Here it is possible to make out the shape of a bird in the distance, there a repeating pattern of elongated elements seems to hang on long stems creating a kind of fan. Other photos have dark backgrounds punctuated with dots of light and streaks of brightness. Some of the forms appear to take the shape of enigmatic creatures drifting through space.
Through the repetition of one single process, with only limited materials – sunlight and glass – an unimaginable variety of forms comes into being. In contrast to comparable photographic works by the legendary Lotte Jacobi entitled photogenics Margit Hart’s Schattenflüge are not photograms, even though this was a technique she made use of in the 1990s. Many of them are negatives: in the pictures with a light background, shadows turn to light and vice versa. In other respects Hart barely intervenes in the developing process.
In his epochal Bauhaus book Painting, Photography, Film, Moholy-Nagy describes a photogram by Man Ray with the following words: «There, through the novel use of the material, the everyday becomes the enigmatic.»⁵ Margit Hart uses commonplace objects and with them brings into being magical compositions.

1 Alvin Langdon Coburn: ‹The Future of Pictorial Photography,› in: Photograms of the Year 1916, London 1916, pp. 23–24, here p. 24. Quoted after http://www.fotomanifeste.de/user/pages/manifeste/1916-Coburn-TheFutureofPictorialPhotography/ faksimile-coburn.pdf?g-bd986df0, accessed 2/25/2019.

2 Ruth Horak, ‹Narration und die neue Reduktion in der Fotografie› in: id. Rethinking Photography I + II: Narration und neue Reduktion in der Fotografie, Salzburg/Graz 2003,
pp. 92–129, here p. 121.

3 Ibid., p. 121.

4 The full quotation is as follows: «There are indications that with a changing of intellectual attitude the photographer of today is no longer exclusively interested in photogenic (the traditional illusionism plus glamor) renderings, but more in synthetically composed situations. His attitude is shifting to the control of photographic effects rather than on the event itself. He tries to acquire not only a photogenic but a photocreative mind. He will not only select what he finds but he will produce situations, introduce devices so far unused and neglected, which for him contain the necessary qualities of photographic expression.» László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Chicago 1955, p .209.

5 László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotografie Film, Munich 1925, p. 75.