In July 2008, I had a lengthy conversation with Walter Keller. At that time, the co-founder of the Winterthur Photo Museum and ex-publisher of SCALO was engaged in restructuring the Swiss cultural magazine DU and make it profitable again. According to the publishing house, it had been agreed in advance that he had a limited amount of time in which to achieve this. His engagement lasted only from January to September 2008. The initial part of the interview only refers to DU. (Full German text here/Deutscher Text hier) The subsequent parts dealing with photography in general have been translated.
To Interview.
Horst Kloever: Walter Keller, is it possible to be still in love with photography after such a long and intensive confrontation in a period of image hyperinflation (“Bilderwahn”)?
Walter Keller: In the same way as psychoanalysis time and again deals with the individual and cannot be generalized, there is no such thing as “the photography”. This is why it never interested me as such. There are just eyes which look at the world, either frightened or angry, tender or ironical, wide awake or trance like. And eventually, a camera comes into play. With many, either young or old, the basic error today is that the camera and the idea of a professional career seem to have priority. But don’t worry: Each generation discovers the world anew. And it also has the right to rediscover how to view it.
HK: Today any mediocre photographer, who wants this, is seen as an artist, almost everybody publishes a more or less limited edition. In 2003, you referred to a “total crisis” facing photography, to an inflation (interview with Thilo Koenig in PHOTONEWS of 19 March 2002). What has been your experience since then, what can today be collected with the expectation of a long-term value?
WK: Anyone who has the courage to virtually press the “delete” key and suppress most of the emails he gets daily and who listens to his inner voice instead of collecting with his art exhibition ears will see the right pictures before his inner eye. Great help will the poems of Nelly Sachs and writings of Pasolini… and I really mean it. The most important word for collectors today is “no”. But renunciation is an art. Anyone who knows who he is, knows what he collects despite the daily avalanche of photographic pictures. Destroy what does not arouse you or occupies you for more than a second while a dealer tries to talk you into buying something.
HK: Is the photo market excessively inflated, will there be a crash soon?
WK: Not a crash, but the chaff has already joined the chaff, and the wheat has joined the wheat. And we have seen enough photo-shopped island landscapes in museums. There is no longer any need for this, or is there? Luckily, we are referring to a minority scene. Otherwise, there would soon be soap-opera like photography on TV.
HK: Photo artists such as Sally Mann and others in the West and the East refuse to make use of digital technology, they apply traditional methods such as collodion processes or daguerreotype. A short-lived trend or a sustainable counter movement?
WK: There have always been niches, they are important, and as long as the material is available, why not? But let the others live their digital lives, too!
HK: The reports in the DU issues, created by you, on explosive political subjects of the past few years had the purpose of arousing interest in readers and even shocking them. Can photography achieve the same?
WK: No, it cannot. But what it can is to move our soft souls adagio and pianissimo. If it is not photography, but if something has become an image. And finding images is as difficult as sniffing truffles. But photos are a dime a dozen.
HK: What is the difference between an image and a photo?
WK: Unlike “photos”, “images” are visual works which create, beyond their character of reflecting reality, a genuine symbolic added value and by which the creator communicates his/her innermost vision of the interpretation of the world. In the same way as a painter or a lyricist creates a world by casting his/her world in pictures. In this sense, Ruth Erdt is the creator of highly emotional, absolutely personal pictures which are of such a personal character that they can turn into something universally accepted.
HK: What is your greatest inspiration at the moment?
WK: That which happens outside art, and there mainly in natural sciences. Within the cultural sector, there is a growing danger that a network of art schools and agents, that is, curators or chief editors, such as myself, of institutions and foundations will drown young artists in promotion schemes. The many hundreds of new galleries are likely to accelerate careers of young artists. But time and again, some gifted artist is discovered there, too. To hear, to look, to taste, this is what inspires me. And the questions which our little daughter asks the world around her.
