Starting Point - Internationale Photoszene

The photographer and conceptual artist Philipp Goldbach uses a wide range of media to investigate the relationship between time, language and image. The finite nature of storage media, whether analog carriers or digital data formats and program versions, leads to a constant process of data migration.
The artist interrupts the connection between the carrier medium and the depicted and brings them into a new relationship. To this end, Goldbach experiments with processes of analogue photography and dissolves the archive as a medium for the transfer of stored knowledge.

In the large-scale installation ‘Via Lucis’ (2015) Goldbach uses the holdings of the Art History Institute of Cologne University of approximately 200,000 slides. The photographic reproductions of works of art representing over 2000 years of cultural history are layered to form a three-dimensional wall painting of 2.5 x 8 meters with a flickering, random pattern. The finding of individual images is made impossible, the closed corpus of an inherited legacy is suspended and at the same time transformed into a seemingly digital form.

"I am interested in a perspective on the archive as a whole that is ultimately not attainable, but is approximately possible at threshold moments: when a medial layer - like that of the analog photographic age - is detached and replaced or shifts in the order of the archive.“ - Philipp Goldbach

Philipp Goldbach is invited AMA artist at the Rheinisches Bildarchiv (RBA).

Philipp Goldbach: Interview on Photoszene ON AIR 2020.