Dörte Eißfeldt

Tageslicht (Daylight)

Light as Materia Prima

Coming from painting and filmmaking, Dörte Eißfeldt (b. Hamburg, 1950; lives and works in Neuenkirchen and Hamburg) increasingly dedicated herself to photography from the mid-1970s onward. The artist explains that working with this medium means working with fragments of reality, and so her photo montages, multiple exposures, and experimental series refer not so much to a reality existing outside them as to their own photographic genesis. 

The limited edition Tageslicht illustrates Eißfeldt’s experimental handling of light and light-sensitive photographic papers. Light is photography’s primary matter and establishes the open, uncoded and immediate connection between human being and world. The photogram—reproduced as a high-end pigment print—reveals how light becomes the subject of a picture before existing as a motif.