STUTTGART.- Parrotta Contemporary Art presents today “Substances of Vanity – Still life Photography from Leipzig,” on view through June 6, 2009. The artists in this exhibition initially all have one thing in common: they have all studied under Timm Rautert at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. "How does one recognize a student of Rautert?" asks Susanne Kippenberger and Timm Rautert replies: "I hope that it is noticed in conversation that he is well educated... one can perhaps also recognize them by the specifity of photography in their work... One sees in the images that they could be made and thought out in no other medium but photography." In order to define this specifity of photography, Sveinn Fannar Johannsson, Edgar Leciejewski, Florian Rossmanith, Nadin Maria Rüfenacht, Oskar Schmidt and Carsten Tabel confront it with the peculiarities and questions of contiguous disciplines. With Victor Stoichita the development of a self-confident image begins with the emergence of still life in painting of the 16th Century. This genre and its tendency for self-criticism establish the starting point for this exhibition. The attention, dedicated to still life works, was considered less about things that were to be seen, and more of the symbolically encrypted message, which communicated itself in complex arrangements beyond its pragmatic use. Also in the photograph series "Nature Morte" by Nadin Maria Rüfenacht the viewer is trying to decipher the iconographic references.The artist, however, deals with the peculiar potential exclusively in photography, of making the difference between dead and alive unrecognizable. So from the three characteristics which Victor Stoichita attributes to still life painting of the 16th Century, one finds at last two in Nadin Maria Rüfenachts photographs: the subject of transience of being and the critical view of the own medium. The self-confident image also knows the history of its own discipline. One is reminded from the eggbeater in Carsten Tabel's "Baronesse" of Man Ray, the artist who understood to give the items a new meaning and to make the "Material out of something wonderful."