BERLIN.- The attempt to understand what the „photographic moment“ is can easily drive you crazy. To capture in words such movements of thought that try to combine reality and illusion, authenticity and theatric, one- and three-dimensionality is not an easy task.

The latency of photographic images, their ambiguity and their iconic logic are the starting point for Philipp Dorl’s work. “I am interested in the processes of transformation within photography: The moment when reality becomes a reflection and when this reflection materialises itself as an image.”

Things such as photographic appliances, tentative hands, a swan and a glove naturally appear next to each other in these seemingly surreal photographs. The images seem to be taken from a sequence of a dream, in which one thing can suddenly transform itself into another and everything constantly shifts and shimmers.

Philipp Dorl does not work in cohesive groups of works, but rather develops loosely connected series of images. In the very sense of Boehm, his photographs and installations go beyond the subject matter and rather present themselves as subjects where material and content are equivalents. Dorl is not set on a specific form of presentation. Sometimes he prints his work on high-quality paper sometimes he uses a laser printer to print them on standard copy paper. He shifts between the use of classical photographic processes, he projects his work on three dimensional objects or as video projections. His extremely minimal presentations give each work enough space to unfold its specific meaning.

Philipp Dorl (*1978) studied photography and media at the University of Applied Science in Bielefeld and at the Royal College of Art, London with a DAAD grant. He lives and works in London. His works have been exhibited internationally, in the UK, in Switzerland, the USA, in Spain and the Netherlands. His graduation project: "…nach Maß, Zahl und Gewicht" (by measure, number and weight), was shown at Plat(t)form 2010 at the Fotomuseum Winterthur and as part of the exhibition "gute aussichten 09/10". In 2011 he received a residency at Künstlerhaus Lukas as well DAAD grant for his Master at the Royal College of Art in London, which he received in 2013. He is currently working new projects at the boundary of photography and sculpture, as well as developing a work for a new building of the Rothschild family in Aylesbury.

It is in the nature of images that they comprise two meanings of depiction: They depict something and they depict themselves. -Gottfried Boehm