Uwe Seyl

Damenweg (chemin des dames), 1994

Since the beginning of the 1970s, Uwe Seyl has been involved in landscape photography; initially in the classic sense and later increasingly by documenting interventions which create changes in landscape and society. In the 1990s, a photographic series of staged visual ‘finds’ was added to this: food fresh from the packet in the refuse, red-painted lips, an old assembly shop’s toilet, the abandoned ore loading station, advertisements for forced auctions, empty business premises, bungee jumpers, tomographs of the photographer’s brain, flocks of birds. Damenweg (chemin de dames) [Ladies‘ Way] is one of an extensive series of landscape photographs in which Seyl works with cross-fades. Reinforced by the abstracting medium of black and white photography, the bleak, unspectacular section of landscape is charged by the medium of time: In the moving details of nature, the photographic moment evokes a before and after, perception and forgetting, seeing and experiencing.