Martin Ogolter
133- Self-portraits | Around 1800 AD Father Constantin Keller(1778-1864) created an impressive collection of wax fruit, especially apples. Today these wax-moulded objects are kept in a monastery in the mountains of austria more famous for its spectacular library. Ogolter went to the monestary and photographed these stunning objects which feature incredible detailed wormholes, mold etc.
Most people today areused to seeing very few kinds fo apples, most supermarkets stock less than ten kinds, this collection has well over one hundred, most extinct today. For this project they have been taken out of the background and given some film grain to highten the visual experience of this being a photograph. This goes to the eternal myths that photographs are either "true" or that they are not, here we have photographs of something that is a copy to begin with and through the way the objects are pesented they become to be seen as something "real". Susan Sontag's quib that "everything is made to end up in a photograph" holds true today more than ever, with the wave of selfies posted daily we included ourselves in this equation, but do we see ourselves as many pictures or those polished supermarket version of ourselves we publish for everyone to see, which mask are we wearing? There is also the parallel to Thomas Demand's work and more specifically Hiroshi Sugimoto's pictures of wax dioramas where photography blends with sculpture on the pictorial surface. martinogolter.com
