In Conversation With: Michel Lamoller: b. 1984, Germany

ML: The basic idea behind my process is to expand an image – whether it’s a portrait, an interior, a still-life or landscape – into depths; to create something sculptural in a way. It probably began when I inherited this big collection of postcards from my Grandma, which I started to group into categories based on what they depicted. There were piles with cars, piles with beaches, bridges, and so on. I’d then stack them on top of one another to form a kind of landscape, cutting out sections to create a sense of depth. I kept on experimenting with this process for a few weeks, after which I started working on a series of small models fashioned from my own photographs. This went on for almost a year; it was a kind of trance…spending hours in the studio, making two or three works every day, going home, sleeping, waking up again, doing some yoga, then back to work!

ML: I’d say it’s a lot more refined and detailed today, and the works I’m making now are much larger in scale, but the general idea has stayed the same. I usually print the same image several times, mounting each one on a piece of cardboard. From there, I start cutting away certain sections from the photograph that will form the first layer, then I place it over the second layer – to see where I want to have something ‘growing’, let’s say. I see it as a kind of digging process, because I work my way down through a stack of images, if you will. 

 

After a couple of rounds of composing the images in depth, I use distance holders to add space between the layers, looking at the stack of images as a 3-dimensional whole for the first time. Everything then goes into the frame, where I study it again over a couple of weeks, making more alterations until I’m satisfied. This really takes time, because the structure of these works is complex, so I need to get to know them, if that makes sense? 

 

ML: Yes, and in doing so I always spot more things to fix. In the end, the process is sculptural, so I’m figuring out how one layer interacts with the one behind – to make each piece as vivid and as strong as possible. I try to keep going until the piece evokes a certain sensation, because if it touches me, it’s more likely to touch the viewer in some way.

ML: Well, first off, there were times when I was frustrated with the dryness of photography. Going out to shoot was always the part I liked, but the endless hours of sitting at the computer working in Photoshop afterwards…I just wanted to do something hands-on. Where someone like Andreas Gursky – who I respect massively – might spend a month on just one work in Photoshop, I would go mad! I could never do it. I need to be on my feet, with music, dancing around the studio every now and again…or else my back will be broken in a few years! 

 

So I try not to rely too much on rationality, or to overthink what I’m doing in the moment of creation – I just do it. Intuition is very important to me: when you’re working day in, day out, the process needs to match your character. You can always plan ahead, but working with a certain physicality is a nice way of letting chance, intuition, the unconscious – all these other nice things we’re composed of – flow into the work. Of course, I could plan each incision on the computer and have each layer laser-cut, but it wouldn’t be the same.

ML: Well – to tell the full story – my dad was a trained photographer, so we had a darkroom in the house where he first showed me black and white printing. And that was exactly this magical thing everyone always talks about; working until 3am in the darkness, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, watching these images emerge from the developer! I appreciated the unique character of photographs, because each print was different, and then there was the grading of course. So by my late teens, I’d already started to identify myself with photography’s materiality. 

 

Later on, at 21, I did an internship with Magnum Photos in New York, but I didn’t follow that path into documentary photography – I was never so interested in one topic that I wanted to tell visual stories about it. Photography for me was more about craft, about aesthetics. And whilst I was looking for different ways of applying the medium I loved, I hated how overused photography was becoming by way of this digital shift. I didn’t feel anything with a digital camera in my hand…it was just this cold tool. So my basic wish was to revive a sense of the magic I’d first fallen in love with. 

 

A big development came in my MFA programme, when I made this project with these small sculptural objects, formed from photographs. For the graduation show, my initial idea was to present just a photograph of this little thing – the model – to add a layer with its own distinct aesthetics, like a kind of Thomas Demand style work. But I decided to display the models in the end. During the opening, I remember leaving the exhibition space for a moment, and when I came back…people were really clamouring to see them! Everyone reacted really strongly to the little objects themselves!

 

ML: For sure! I think it’s increasingly rare for us to look closely at the the things around us, but in this case, it was as if people were going into that process of perceiving, looking and questioning again, you know? So I quickly realised that it was something I should develop.

ML: It’s probably the former, in that my process carries me from one project to the next. But equally, when we look back we always see connections…or maybe we just make up a story whereby everything suddenly makes sense! In any case, I realise that many of my projects expresses this need to compress as much information as possible into an image. I could focus on anything, but something draws me to the urban landscape time and again, where there’s always a lot going on; a lot to convey. I used to tell myself I was doing it for stylistic reasons, but I think it’s probably a far more deep-rooted interest in urbanity. 

 

Coming from a small village in the Black Forest, I think I’ve always been sensitive to the landscape, but I had these particularly visceral experiences of visiting huge cities for the first time. In Hong Kong and Istanbul, for instance, my brain just collapsed: it was totally overwhelming! I think my mind wasn’t used to that density of information – of sound, smell, colour. But it was significant, too.

 

More and more of humanity is being swallowed up by the city nowadays, and that’s my biography as well. The first half of my life was spent in the countryside, the other half in the city. So the technical aspects of my process are definitely a thread, but urbanity’s also there. I must say, though, I was super frustrated with this question of subject matter for many years; I often asked friends, ‘What should I do? I have this technique…but what theme should I work with?’. Looking for that subject definitely drove a lot of experimentation, but now I feel it’s started to emerge from the work organically.

 

  

 ML: Yeah, you can’t really push it, that’s the interesting thing. I liked the way Saltz talked about this idea of ‘deep content’ – meaning that work like mine is already embedded in our time. And just the idea of taking images and morphing them into 3-dimensional sculptures tells us something about today. Put simply, people in the Renaissance wouldn’t have done that! 

 ML: So I stole the anthropogenic mass title from a study I read by the Weizmann Institute, which claimed that the mass of everything manmade is now equal to that of all biomass on the planet. So it denotes an historical point in time that says a lot about where we are as humans. 

 

Despite the constant spread of our cities, we maintain these naive images in our heads for thinking about the landscape, and about nature. Still today, if you open a kid’s book, you’ll find all this imagery of wild animals, or the jungle, creating an impression that there’s something wild and unchartered to go out and conquer. My kids still ask all these questions about which animal is the most dangerous and stuff like that.

 

ML: We’ll present a mix of my framed urban landscape works, as well as some larger scale installations, which are inspired by the same process of cutting and layering. These installations are immersive – people can enter and interact with them in the space. From a particular angle, the different parts combine to create a single image, whereas from the side the parts are totally fragmented. For me, the point is that people can enter an image. And here we could go in numerous philosophical directions about what that means; about our connection to images and how they shape our perception the world, but I don’t think we need to go down that rabbit hole!

 

The framed works – there’ll be 9 of them in the exhibition – are all images shot in China, which I also think is significant because, when you travel there, you get a more acute sense of the times we’re living in than you might elsewhere. That’s because they’re not trying to hide the pace of change and construction; I think it’s similar to how you would have felt in New York in the 1930s. China is a reflection of what’s happening now, at an amazing speed. It has an impressive energy, but with a very fucked up flip side of course. It doesn’t feel healthy.

 

Naturally, I see these cities through a certain lens because I’m educated in all of the doomsday scenarios about globalisation and climate change, which I’m fed through TV and in newspapers. So when someone comes to a place like China, they can either be awestruck by a perceived progress, or be horrified! And that’s really dependent on what information – on what images – you have consumed in your culture.