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Holger Salach

Awarded

Holger Salach

Publication 'Alles kann - nichts muss' (diploma work)

Photography

Jury report

Seeing and being seen
How can part­ner­swap­ping be recorded pho­to­graph­i­cally? With a lot of naked skin, gen­i­tals, male and fe­male bod­ies locked in em­braces as cou­ples or com­bi­na­tions of more peo­ple. And yet the Zurich – based pho­tog­ra­pher Hol­ger Salach's 'Alles kann – nichts muss' (every­thing can – noth­ing must) does not meet the ex­pec­ta­tions of pro­fes­sional pornog­ra­phy. The bod­ies of the men and women in­volved are not spe­cially cho­sen, but quite or­di­nary; the light­ing is crude, and scarcely flat­ters their naked skin. The set­tings for the part­ner-swap­ping, pri­vate dwellings, are any­thing but glam­orous. As well as in­te­rior views, Salach also shows des­o­late-look­ing car parks, en­trances to houses, streets, petrol sta­tions and mo­tor­way ser­vice sta­tions, and the oc­ca­sional view out of a home.
The pho­tographs were taken over a pe­riod of three years and sub­mit­ted in book form as a diploma pro­ject from the pho­tog­ra­phy class at the Hochschule für Gestal­tung und Kunst Zürich. The pho­tog­ra­pher jux­ta­poses his aus­tere, un­spec­tac­u­lar im­ages with texts. These re­pro­duce con­tacts being made via ads on the In­ter­net, with part­ners who are will­ing to swap ar­rang­ing to meet. Salach has also con­stantly cap­tured in his pic­tures how par­tic­i­pat­ing swingers take pho­tographs of them­selves as a hobby. The fact is that sex­u­al­ity is shifted from a pri­vate to a semi-pub­lic con­text on this scene: see­ing and being seen is per­haps even more im­por­tant than the sex­ual act it­self.
As a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher, Salach was also con­fronted with the swingers' es­tab­lished ideas about pic­tures. Some­one re­marks in one of the e-mail mes­sages that Salach's pho­tographs had been a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing: 'We had ex­pected con­sid­er­ably more aes­thetic pho­tographs.' Hol­ger Salach's con­cep­tual image – text doc­u­men­ta­tion wrests a fresh and in­tel­li­gent view from a sub­ject that is sup­pos­edly played out. Here he is re­ly­ing quite cal­cu­lat­ingly on the view­ers' voyeurism, and he is just as de­lib­er­ately slip­ping under their guard as well.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Holger Salach
Born in
1974
Education
Designer FH mit Vertiefung in Fotografie

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