Bogomir Ecker: was das Foto verschweigt = what the photo withholds

Abstract

Bogomir Ecker is well-known for his sculptures, which are specific to a location or context, as well as for his huge installations and enigmatic objects. These works challenge our sensory experience. In his art, Ecker is primarily questioning how the world's technological developments are affecting human beings, how our perception, thoughts, and feelings are changing through the media and modern communication. From old press photos, for example, Ecker arranges large-sized, associative tableaux. The pictures thus lose their previous reference frame and their original import as conveyors of news. In other works, he paints over and punctures individual photos or entire newspapers. He isolates and distorts particular motifs, in order to contest the veracity of the picture or to highlight the selectivity of press coverage. Although Ecker has never taken photos himself in an artistic sense, his sculptural works repeatedly refer to the medium of photography. Between 1979 and 1982, he developed his Nachtfotos (night photos). To create these images, Ecker painted a wide variety of objects in public spaces with phosphorous ink, in order to subsequently document them by letting them flash up through the camera in the brief moment of their visibility.