GUNTER SACHS HAPPY OPTICS

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2 GUNTER SACHS HAPPY OPTICS According to a proverb, lucky men are born with a silver spoon in the mouth. It seems that in the cradle Gunter Sachs was given a magic glass instead of a spoon. In any case, his photos record not only landscapes, images of celebrities and nude models. Separately and in aggregate they give a firm world view: mysteriously spectacular, defiantly luxurious and provocatively erotic. Sachs himself declares that the visual has a dispositional connotation in his works. He has several works that he calls diptychons. They are certain metaphoric mirrors placed opposite to each other. The subject realities which they reflect are different but the amalgam makes differences less evident and states similarity. For example, in the Diptychon Little Forest a nude female body is shot as a landscape and the landscape is assimilated to a female body. Such optics not only charm, but also cause explicable envy at the happy feeling of reality in which the sensual naturally pierces through the visual, and the magic through the sensual. Some modern critic once wrote that the photography of fashion today is the fashion itself. In view of the extreme importance of the critical discourse in the development of the camera culture, one can say that the system of photography description is the photography itself. That is why in order to explain at least to myself the Sachs effect I will use two polar definitions which to my mind are basic for the understanding of the modern photography. The first one control appeared in the course of development of the American, according to Walker Evance, documentary style. I am interested in this category irrelative of the material which caused its appearance, it is a characteristic of the interference in the surrounding reality. Susan Sontag suggested the second definition visual autonomy ( as the painting is becoming more and more conceptual, poetry, beginning with Guillaume Apollinaire, Eliot, Pound and William Carols Williams, stressed its bond with the visual ( The truth is only in the things themselves, declared Williams). The mentioned poets were devoted to the autonomy and concreteness of poetic language similarly to the photographers devoted to the visual autonomy (S. Sontag. On Photography. Picador USA, NY., p.96). I suppose, Sachs art develops between the control pole and the autonomy pole. What do I mean by control? Does not this notion contradict the sensuality, the richness and the sanguineous perceptual plan declared in the beginning? I think, no. To my mind, control is intelligence and selectivity of vision. The point is in the vision, Sachs has a happy vision the visual is organically decorated by the sensual and magic. However, it does not mean that the vision, moreover, professional vision, is spontaneous. Not at all. Interfering in reality, the author, according to his vision, arranges it as sensual, he can intensify the erotic moment or remove it. He can articulate corporality or virtuality. He can grab naturalness and not-staging as in Debut, or openly stage the luxurious performance as in Ascot. Moreover, the author may lay claim to the broadening of the reality at the expense of switching on some consciousness mechanisms dream, meditation, hallucination and other mechanisms. The main thing is that this interference process is dirigible and well-weighed, meant for response. In the theory of photography Walter Benjamin s definition the optical unconscious caused divergence of opinions. Sachs Sand-Storm. Durban 82 Detail 9

3 GUNTER SACHS obviously takes into consideration the experience of the sociopsychoanalytic analysis of photography stimulated by Walter Benjamin. Thus, I would call his line the optical conscious. There is also the second aspect. Professional vision with all the personal and author s aspects that define it has its own processualness. It is formed also by the experiencing art. Sachs considers control to be a conscious appropriation of the other art experience. It does not mean stylization. It does not even mean the use of this other art optics. However, in some reactions towards the modern artists he wittingly interprets their special methods, but here the result lies on the surface and is predictable. The most powerful things are connected with the experience of vision and feeling accumulated by certain visual arts phenomena. For Sachs, I think, it is primarily metaphysical painting, Surrealism and Pop Art. He experiences these phenomena as the visual style, as the style of vision, thinking and even behaviour. For example, in the Kalahari diptychon he perceives reminiscences of metaphysical painting as his personal emotional experience: loneliness, optical illusion, distrust to the visible connected with the danger of missing the transcendent because of the exterior. He uses not only the stylistic and compositional methods of Pop Art in Hommage à Warhol. He carries out his own research of the consequences of the icon creation: if the process of replication and aggressive application to the mass consciousness has a back swing, is it possible to preserve the human identity? What about the second pole the visual autonomy? It is simple Sachs visual wanders on its own as a cat, without a semantic and stylistic burden. This may be colour (coloured fabric or simply paint squeezed out of a tube) as in Red Colour and Blue Colour, sky motif as in Sand-Storm, hair motif as in Magic. There is no use in searching for semantic or other allusions in the Stripes or Mambas diptychons. Sachs likens his model Tanja Veit neither to a snake, nor to a zebra. This is just the visual that breaks through with all its unpredictable all-sufficiency! Alexander Borovsky Sand-Storm. Durban 82 Detail 10

4 LOVE, WORK AND PLEASURE In one of his interviews Gunter Sachs expressed his life s motto. He was born in Bavaria in November in At the age of three he, his mother and brother moved to Switzerland because of his mother s aversion to Nazism. Gunter Sachs is a photographer, designer, documentalist, writer and despite his age a famous German playboy. All his life he has lived an unconventional lifestyle which in many respects defined his oeuvre especially in the field of photography. Gunter Sachs is always at the forefront of contemporary art. He spent a lot of time in a meeting place of Parisian Bohemia Coupole, a brasserie where artists, writers and acclaimed and unknown journalists of all trends used to gather. Personalities like Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway were regulars there. In he was president of the Modern Art Museum, Munich. He was really enthusiastic about the artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann, who determined twentieth-century art. This intellectual milieu formed Sachs views on contemporary art. Gunter Sachs took up photography in the 1970s. His early works are full of Surrealistic representations, which was a result of his friendship to Salvador Dali and interest in works by Max Ernst. He designs covers for the Vogue magazine, creates Surrealistic photographs Perspektive, View, Esquisse pour une statue and Play in the Universe. The paradoxical situation in his photographs is compositionally intensified: unusual perspective, appropriate fragments of reality, which push together incompatible elements against a background of picturesque landscapes. Numerous compositions were created on the principle of confrontation between various natural forms, especially connected with representation of a man. He searches for analogies in the real world (Stripes). His works are very emotional. Documental representation intensified the Surrealistic character of the image. Aesthetics of situation and subjective perception play a key role in his photography. That is why some details play an important and autonomous role in representation. Imitation of real space (in the view of three-dimensionality), though with imaginary content, became a characteristic of his works. His surrealistic photographs fit well into the context of subjective photography, the principles of which were formulated by German Otto Steinert in the late 1950s. In contrast to classical black-and-white subjective photography, Gunter Sachs sees aesthetics of situation in the colour solution of a shot. The Nude genre attracts photographers from the very appearance of photography. Under the influence of Surrealism this genre got further development. Unlike Bill Brandt who used influence of perspective distortions for creation of Surrealistic effect, Gunter Sachs achieves artistic effect due to the forming of imaginary situations in real space. The experience gained during the creation of such compositions enriched the mastery of the photographers and was used for the creation of photographs for magazines. After the Second World War Surrealism became generally recognized and popular in the field of fine art. These photographs evoke increased emotional influence on readers. Contemplation Detail 13

5 GUNTER SACHS Gunter Sachs creates images from his life as a wealthy man. An heir of a steel empire. For many people it is a dream, for him it is reality. That is why in his life and photography everything is the best. He was married to Brigitte Bardot. His models were always very beautiful and sexual. Claudia Schiffer posed for him in the image of the most beautiful women of various epochs Cleopatra, Jeanne d Arc, Isadora Duncan and Mata Hari. His photographs significantly show a well-known principle: Only the erotic is fashionable. The oeuvre of Sachs introduces the viewer to the world of dreams, creates the image of a miraculously colourful life which exists only in one s reveries and fancy, the life that many of us would gladly plunge into. He does it with a lot of imagination and the professional mastery of a photographer. He exhibits the lifestyle of bohemia and introduces the viewer to it. The world of Sachs s photography is attractive, exciting and in most cases unachievable. His photographs have become a reflection of the culture of a certain stage of social development. The Englishmen would call him a culture bearer. This is, in fact, the reason for the tremendous popularity of his photographs. In 1997 the Medizin und Kunst magazine registered Sachs among a hundred of the world s best known personalities in art. For more than a hundred and sixty years of the history of photography, artists and photographers have often employed one and the same aesthetic doctrine interacting in their creative oeuvre. Pre-Raphaelism and the pictorialism of the 19th century, modern 20th century art are impossible to conceive without photography. In its turn the development of photography is impossible without the growing influence of fine art. Pop Art has exorted the strongest influence on photography and its impact is quite distinct in the oeuvre of Sachs. The reiteration of the main element contributes to intensifying the meaning of the epoch-making fetish which leads to a certain transformation of the original implication of a trivial object into a peculiar work of art. A can of soup, a dollar bill and then a portrait of the symbol of the sexual revolution Marilyn Monroe and Warhol, portrait of Claudia Schiffer (Hommage à Warhol) by Sachs. The stylistics of pop are sustained due to special treatment of photographic material when the halftones are eliminated and the representation is thus given certain graphicality. The graphic design is also made polychrome. Cultivating this idea he resorts to computer compilation in the stylistics of photographic multiexposition or shooting through a multiprism, thus filling the space with repeating elements. He combines the repetition of representational fragments of Pop Art with the glamour of glossy magazines. In this case we can already speak about the influence of photorealism. This device was resorted to in his cameraworks of the 1990s. The Ascot (the racetrack and the races themselves near Windsor) (1995) is compositionally similar to Hommage à Warhol (1991) with its parallelism between beauty, sexual attractiveness and the rich life of the elite. A beautiful lady in a conventional hat looks through a binocular at a viewer and repeatedly demonstrates the lifestyle of the social elite. 14

6 GUNTER SACHS Sachs has enriched the Playboy typology with a new content. Even his magazine photographs, as it has often been the case with some other gifted photographers, have become an inseparable component of modern art. New computer technologies have enabled Sachs to reappraise Surrealism (New York 1). The reflections in the mirror-like windows of skyscrapers, agglomeration of buildings, saturated colours help create surrealistic city landscapes. Sachs tried his hand at rendering plastics of movement by means of photography. We can find in his works classical plastic forms as well as surrealistic representation. One representation often bears different phases of movement, flickering, turning up in our consciousness as if in stroboscopic light, reminding us of Muybridge s investigations of the 19th century and futuristic experiments. Sachs spectaculously creates sequences on obviously trivial subjects. Sachs is very particular about colours. Colour representations with intensified colourlit considerably increase the spectacular character of his works and thus influence the viewer. The photographer admires colour and enjoys it. Sachs is a restless person, traveling much and never staying anywhere long. Lately he started contributing to different galleries. And, at last, his exhibition of photographs has reached Saint Petersburg, a fact no less surrealistic than his works themselves. So now the Russian artlovers have the opportunity to enjoy his oeuvre. Alexei Loginov 15