Peter Keetman and the visual displacements in street photography

15/07/2018 Fabio Salun

Peter Keetman was a German photographer, who was born in 1916 and died in 2005. He learned to photograph with and under the influence of his father, who studied photography in Munich and was one of the founders of the group “fotoform”, which had worldwide repercussions in the decade of 60. One of his best known works is a series of images that he produced for a week in a Volkswagen factory. These images do not depict the daily of the workers, much less the spaces or equipment of the factory, but concentrate on the graphics and drawings created by the pieces and elements that were found in the company.

But regardless of the experiences he had produced at the Volkswagen factory, this symptom expands to all his production. The photographer also acted a lot in street photography and one of the experiments that he proposed was to use long exposure times to capture the movement of the city that was becoming more and more contemporary. From a wide exposure of the shutter he captured passers-by in night scenes creating ghostly and distorted images enlarging and exploring the visual possibilities of photography.

By pointing his lenses at urban spaces, Ketmman also looks for some symptoms of a displaced photograph in the architectural spaces, capturing not the urban space itself, but mainly his movements, drawings and graphs. The images produced by him on the street, as well as those produced in the factory, do not show a concern with the place or theme, the most relevant value in his compositions are the drawings given by a concise framework and by the visual games that establish the everyday objects . The reading of his images little allows us to see or to recognize the object,  just as it does not serve much in its architectural aspect or documentary, but it creates a dynamism and a complex visual game, filling the space of forms and rethinking the visuality of the photographic object.

Peter Keetman did not bother to detach the photographic image from its real signifiers. In “droplet reflections” he photographed water droplets (probably from rain) on a reflecting surface. The whole image has a texture given by the drops on the surface that reflect the framed image in the background. This background also has dark bands (darker than the ones below) where it is possible to perceive a silhouette (probably of the photographer) that, like fractals, repeats the same drawing in an infinity of separated elements putting itself in all the particular universes that are given by the drops. The image has a dynamism created by the rhythms of the bubbles, which are now larger or smaller, putting the viewer’s eyes in a frantic movement, without a beginning or an end.

Thus, from the photographic production of Peter Ketemman, we can see that the symptom of displaced photography also appears in the work of street photography, showing that in addition to beautiful images, in all fields of photography there is the possibility of breaking the connection between the image produced by the photograph and the referential space in which it was taken.

Fábio Salun

Master degree in Visual Arts by UDESC

fabio.salun@gmail.com

Translation: Bárbara Gual

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