Steffen Junghans

With his photographic work, Steffen Junghans has always worked against the blinding work of clarity. By doing so, he offers to admit the sensory anxiety of uncertainties. He rapidly searches for new materials and objects to present in large format photographs (in analogue technique) that at first glance may be a lie.
Through the medium of photography Junghans captures a reality that only exists for a short period of time. Countless attempts are required in order to truely represent the fiction of the picture. Location, light, props, models – everything that we see in the photograph is a manifestation of an idea.
Many things happen when Junghans directs his work in line with the traditions from the early artists who used light: the picture becomes determined by the moment its recorded – the inscription of the light onto the negative is final and it is irreversible, thus making it a unique process. Finally, the comparable mode of work is important because it stereotypes the later reading of the images, although on the other hand the picture has already fallen into oblivion when it became a new thought.
The highly self-reflective mode of operation mainly refers to the inventiveness and the limits of artistic photography. We may find ourselves asking: what is fiction? What are the limits of the imagination? And it leads to question the difference between (aesthetic) photography and (photorealistic) painting – Is it gradual or is it fundamental?
Junghans’ motives are not real images. They describe attempts to approach reality and test out possible ways to meditate visual thoughts. In contrast to this, they negotiate the impossibility of an encyclopedic documentation of reality. A final and valid representation of the present is not possible. This is where the »Kapitulation« (»Capitulation«) series (I, II, III) begins. So what is the goal of a contemporary photographers work? In turn, the attempts to answer this open up new opportunities for photography.
The series of »Bildnisse« (»Portraits«) present both different experiences and fictions. In order to escape the »Realitätsfalle« (»Reality Trap«), Jungians’ motifs are created in a way that breaks through conceptions of reality. The tension between the real and the staged starts provoking the assumption based on contemporary photography when it becomes art.