We are glad to announce to you an artistic research called "Picturepeople".
Once a month we propose to send you an e-mail containing a series of photographs
(max. 10 JPEGS = max. 300 KB) and a short accompanying text.
The pictures are all found (amateur-) photographs representing people.
The photographs are part of fictions (due to their re-contextualisation)
and they reveal different phenomena in human representation, interrogating
mainly cultural and social issues and making connections to other fields
of representation. These aspects constitute the subject of our research.
The text accompanying each series of pictures will serve as an introduction
à hopefully leading to further discussions. An archive will make it possible
for you to observe the progress of the project.
HOW TO LOCATE
If you want to subscribe to this project please send a mail to: picturepeople@web.de with the subject: subscribe
Yours, Kristofer Paetau (artist) & Rüdiger Heinze (writer)
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
So, I am an artist (born in Finland 1972). Now I live in Berlin since 6 months and before I lived&worked&studied in Finland, in France and in Germany. I work with found photographs from the internet (most of the time). I produce photoarchives documenting specific themes in human representation. The mail-project is part of this activity and displays parts of my theme&concept-related photoarchives. I also use some photographs to make large Poster-like paintings on paper, a bit like hand-made film-posters, but made in a technique close to that of "painting by numbers". I like this peculiar way in which some people reproduce works of Van Gogh or other old masters. I also prefere amateur-photographs to photographs made by artists, because amateur photographs tend to focus on something else than the picture-itself, therefore the picture often has more potential than photographs which are very self-conscious pictures, or which document some artistic event, action or performance. Although I like the pictures I select, I think that their real potential is revealed through the re-contextualisation I operate - that produces fictions and calls for questions related to other fields of artistic representation and to different cultural and social representations.
My good friend Rüdiger Heinze (has lived & studied in the USA some years and now lives in Germany, Braunschweig, same age as I) is a writer and does his dissertation on the subject "Ethics of form in contemporary american literature". He writes the text accompanying each series of pictures that we send away. He has a difficult task because he never knows what I will send him and he must stay short and can not use difficult english terms since a lot of people who get our missives don't understand english very well. And of course we don't know the people who receive our mails. We have more than 4000 adresses that I have collected here and there.
Our project just started and it will go on for at least one year (that's the deal I made with Rüdiger).
Yours, Kristofer Paetau