INSIDE OUT - WHITE MOUNTAINS - BERND NICOLAISEN

Wood - transformative power in Alabaster and Gesso

Man is facing major upheavals. We are fundamentally changing the world around us and developing such a power of transformation that we have even founded a new age: the Anthropocene. The world of images is also changing a lot and extremely rapidly. Here we are at the end of an analogue and material era in which the pictures came out of the box, and we are now entering a digital and immaterial era in which our pictures are calculated by a kind of mirror with a record button.

Bernd Nicolaisen accompanies both upheavals in his photographs. With great curiosity, he searches for places in this world with the camera that manifest themselves in geological time dimensions, in which man and his development become almost invisible in fast motion. In a way, there is only a before and an after. This shows how indifferent our planet and the universe are to our existence. However, what we do with this opportunity is in our hands.

Between 2005 and 2009, Bernd photographed 4,000 year old mountain pines in the remote mountains of the Sierra Nevada with a plate camera on 8x10 inch black and white negative film. The arduous hike with heavy luggage to the difficult-to-find trees in the White Mountains and the extensive photographic work on site were part of the process. There is something meditative and awesome about it, yes, definitely also performative. This is not about topicality and not about the decisive moment in the sense of Henri Cartier Bresson. Bernd Nicolaisen looks for lasting traces - traces that were there long before him and will be there long after him.

The black drawings that run through the ancient wood of the pines are proof that time and probability are relative terms: every tree here was struck by lightning at least once in its life. Thinking in terms of human lifetimes or even photographic exposure times, this is almost unimaginable. And yet it is exactly what Bernd Nicolaisen manages to depict in the picture by collapsing the two time levels. More than ten years have passed since Nicolaisen took photos in the Sierra Nevada. But at this moment of the paradigm shift and our changing visual culture, he returned to his earlier work: in a kind of homage to the analog process in general and film in particular, he took out the negatives again and as such in a new series, Inside Out – White Mountains, reviewed in todays context.

The wood and its drawing are different, alienated in the negative. A trained eye can “read” and “translate” this representation. And yet the inversion of the tonal values ​​can also stand as something of its own and does so quite consciously in this series. Light trails. The picture literally shines out from within. Most of the light now penetrates where comparatively little light hit the film and thus draws a different image. The brightest areas often indicate where lightning once made its way through the wood or burned. You can read it allegorically, or simply let yourself be fascinated and seduced by the structures in their abstraction.

In collaboration with Adam Lowe and the Factum Arte team, he reinterpreted the negatives in Gesso Aluminium prints and on 3D Alabaster Aluminium and black ink. The inversion of the tonal values can also stand for itself and does so quite consciously in this series. Removed from reality by at least one degree, the images from Inside Out – White Mountains open up new worlds and other times.

Project-Team: Georg Novinger, Adam Lowe, Factum Arte, Daniel Blochwitz, Cédric Marville


Process: Data from 8x10 Inch negative, transformed into 3D. Numerically controlled milled alabaster adhered to an aluminium distribution plate with a rear hanging clip. The stone surface is dyed with black ink to obtain the grey scale and does not have any protective treatment. By Factum Arte, Madrid, 2022