Daniel Gustav Cramer
in conversation with Zeno Hölscher

In 2001 I moved to London to study. I settled into a house in the East, in Hackney. Every day I travelled across town, to the college in Kensington and back. I was overwhelmed by the chaos, the noise, the constant inflow of information. On top of it all, it was right then that the Twin Towers were attacked. Intuitively, as a first project, I decided to take a simple, singular photographic image, as far away from the city as possible – somewhere deep inside a forest. I imagined a kind of utopian landscape, entirely real and an image of a dream at the same time – the idea of a forest visualised: one that lures you in, where you get lost in, and one that holds you at the same time, protects you; a forest of fairy tales and nightmares. I thought of this image as a kind of origin.

In other words, you didn’t use the medium, photography, to document a location situation, but the location to create an imaginary image in photographic detail.

Yes, that’s it. Photography lures the eye into seeing something seemingly real. The trees, their foliage, everything in these photographs is what has been in front of the lens, no post-production. Still, the images document an imaginary world. There is hardly any natural environment today unaffected by human influence, and most of the time, unfortunately, that influence is a form of destruction. The camera, and that’s its magic, in a way, is a tool of selection and exclusion. At times I found myself standing on top of a car, trucks with logs roaring past behind me, as I took a seemingly quiet, serene picture of “untouched” landscape. The project creates a utopian portrayal, a highly detailed record of a place that does not exist any more – or perhaps not yet. I wonder how the planet might look today if it had not been impacted by the Anthropocene, if it was devoid of human influence. Or as Simone Weil writes: Imagine how beautiful this landscape must be without me standing here.

And this is how you started the third part, Mountain?

Daniel: Right. A few months later I travelled to the Alps, and the following year to the Rocky Mountains, the Carpathians, and so on. Looking at the prints of the three series now, they were taken in almost opposite locations, though all are part of the same biosphere. The mist present in all three worlds seems to permeate from the woodlands to the landscapes beneath the water’s surface and through the valleys of the mountains, uniting all three.

I see what you mean. I notice how the mist fills the rooms within the images, revealing the different shapes formed by the architecture of the landscapes. It feels like an abstract work. What stands at its centre, at least as I perceive it now, are the variations of volume and form, spaces, volumes formed by the natural environment.

I remember this work from your exhibition in Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland. It was the first work the visitor encountered, and all it talked about was connection and care for each other. It was such a simple and touching introduction. In the same show you had placed texts printed on paper on the floor, an almost opposite way of presenting a work, withdrawn and discreet. They demanded far more engagement from the viewer. Why, as a visual artist, do you choose to create works without images?

The visible world is one register of experience. Imagined images operate on another plane; intimate, mutable, and charged. They’re not limited by surface or material; their energy comes from the space between sensation and thought.The text, when it is placed on the floor, interacts with the space. The location of the story and the placement in the space correspond. Now, when you place several texts in a space that describe the same scene from several perspectives, the two experiences, story and exhibition space, change in unison. In the exhibition, you can observe the story like a sculpture, walk around it, look at it from the another point of view.

After, I moved to London. I was living in a room on Cassland Road, first floor. Every five or ten minutes, the 26, a double decker bus, passed my bedroom window. The window was positioned at the same height as the upper floor of the buses, giving me an excellent view of passing commuters whenever I glanced outside. Over several years, a second series developed – one I haven’t exhibited yet. That’s how it started. Since then, I’ve taken photographs whenever I’m out and about.

Most of the Tales are series of small photographs, one next to the other in a horizontal line. Once again, it feels that the story they tell is what’s most important, like visualised Haikus.

As a teenager, I thought I’d become a creator of graphic novels. I carried a sketchbook and pen almost everywhere, sketching small cartoons. I loved the fact that it’s possible to tell complex things with simple drawings – the buildup, one image following the next, the narrative gap between individual frames, the shifts of perspective. I guess this is partly where Tales originates.

The images are printed on the photographic paper, with white space framing them, so you see the paper itself. You are aware these are images, like an abstracted graphic novel, reminiscent of film stills. The images on paper are horizontal. The people are most of the time shown at a distance – little human figures, so small you can hardly discern any features. The attention is on what changes from one image to another, the space between. Yet somehow, the smallest gestures – the movement of a head or an arm – reveal what’s happening inside the peoples minds. For example, there is a series of nuns surrounding a poppy field in Switzerland. On the print, the nuns are perhaps a centimetre in size, tiny – yet the way they raise their heads, look at each other and gesture, tells so much about their joy.

Some of the Tales consist of only two frames, others of several pictures. You even made one with twenty photographs, if I counted correctly. How do you decide on the amount of pictures and frames?

The number of images follows the content. Whatever is needed. It’s a different way of reading a single photographic image or when you look at two photographs beside each other. Your eye moves forward and back, you focus on difference, change and you experience a sense of the passing of time. A progression, several photographs of a scene in a row is completely different again. It often feels like a slowing of time. Some time ago, I spent a day at Lake Mitsero in Cyprus and photographed the tire tracks at the water. In the end, I selected two images, the first and last, one taken in the morning, the other in the evening. The changed appearance of the tracks and the reflection on the lake in the background include all other moments.

The Objects feel like portraits of some kind, personalities. I know that you exhibited another series actually titled Portraits not long ago. How did you develop the series?

This is a work I had saved in my drawer for a long time – maybe twenty years ago I began collecting the first piece: a signed photograph of Millvina Dean, the youngest survivor of the Titanic disaster. At the beginning I wanted to experiment with the possibilities of combining photography and narrative writing. the most basic form would be a text, framed, describing a moment in the life of a person, and an object or photograph placed next to it. The space between the text and the object is crucial. The build-up – the narrative gap between them, the time between frames – sometimes minute, sometimes decades – creates a rhythm similar to editing a film scene. My intention was to create a series of works that look at an individual’s decision – something minor, or a difficult life choice – that reveals a fundamental character trait of the portrayed person. Although we often feel like we have complete control over our lives, the truth is that we can only acknowledge and accept the circumstances we face and make decisions that align with our best intentions.

For the 13th Berlin Biennale, I brought the coyote to Berlin: I printed 1,000 different C-prints and placed them all across the city. The photographs appeared on walls in back alleys, inside books in the Staatsbibliothek, in the Neue Nationalgalerie and Hamburger Bahnhof, in restaurants and private flats; some were given to friends or people I met on the street. The idea was for this body of prints to permeate the city – to cross boundaries between public and private spaces, and to be in motion, alive. Some images were left in cafés and bars – the next day I would receive a message from someone: “I took your coyote image home.” Others were placed in locations that I am sure will only be discovered in the coming years – on top of a wardrobe in Clärchen’s Ballhaus, or inside an abandoned shed outside Marzahn. Although there were so many photographs, you could hardly see any. You know, it is estimated that there are 15,000 foxes in Berlin – and you hardly ever see them either.

Right now, I have actually returned to the very beginning, my first work. I have just been on Yakushima Island in Japan, the exact locations I have visited 20 years ago, and I took several photographs of tree-covered valleys at dawn. I am back in the darkroom.