link to Loretta Fahrenholz at Galerie Buchholz Cologne 2015

For her exhibition The Loss of it All & The Dross of it All, Loretta Fahrenholz revisits and revises traditional photographic genres using commonplace digital technologies.  Street and landscape photography, social documentary and portraiture, can only return otherwise in their exposure to algorithmic processes that are always already at work everywhere – in the camera in the phone, in the hand and in the head.

In Recently Deleted, a series of prints mounted on aluminum, Fahrenholz piles up mobile telephone photography, arranging information in sequences suggesting image folders or even storyboards for potential films. Organizing movements in the world together with non-composed, randomly captured moments, the sequences pick up and lose narrative threads amidst accidental junk-experience. Subjecting social content to the built-in operations of an iPhone 4, these seemingly formalist works navigate a strange, “lossy” zone between documentary and automaticity.

Another series of works (Erlebnishof Millers, 2015) uses a high-tech surveying scanner to document a horse ranch and organic farm in Bavaria. Translating interiors and exteriors into immense clouds of data points, the scanner generates multi-dimensional simulations of real world locations, outputted here as wall-sized vinyl stickers and lenticular “holograms”. In the process of extracting traditional landscapes from the stored data clouds, pastoral views are abstracted and often lost in the process.  A new sort of pointillism renders animal ghosts and their mid-day shadows, fractal fields interrupted by white blanks where information goes missing.

In a third series of photographs, Fahrenholz redeploys the young actresses from her film My Throat, My Air (2014), staging portraits that could also be production stills from an imagined sequel or a make-believe fashion shoot.