Beßling, R: BLANKO

In her artistic works, Franziska von den Driesch works with analogue and digital photography, video, and also photographic procedures that do not involve a camera. Her pictures, videos and installations focus on ushering the photographic material into visibility and interweaving material and apparent reality. The silver grain as an elementary particle of analogue photography, just like the pixel and the raster as building blocks of conveyed reality, become independent protagonists in her works. Photographic motifs are dissolved in layerings, or digitally generated images are transferred into analogue photography. The concept of virtual reality resonates as an implicit possibility.
In his extensive essay Dr. Rainer Beßling, author and cultural journalist, traces out the fundamental motifs of these photographic works: grain, light, time, paper. The categories already point towards the multilayered, material referentiality of the works. Photography presents itself as a residue of physical encounters, as an index. Of central importance are the visual and auto-poetic potentials inherent to the photographic elements and the photographic processes. The text connects this artistic position with lines of tradition in photographic history and integrates them on a systematic level into what is a contemporary aesthetic and not only photographic discourse.