IN PHOTOGRAPHY.
Women's Work is a collaborative project by Courtney Borresen, Peter Bull, Claire Concannon, Nina Coyle, Jessica Greenberg, Ben Haist, Nicole Harvey, Zachary Press, Elizabeth Sankey, Hannah Sonnier, Bayley Sprowl and Zari Williams-Yee.
This web page is an assignment for Foundations of Art: Photography, a course taught by Stephen Hilger at Tulane University.
Karin Apollonia Müller
Karin Apollonia Müller, Fog, 1996
Through her work, Karin Apollonia Müller depicts the ever-changing city of Los Angeles through the eyes of an outsider. Born in Germany in 1963, Müller has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1995; as a result of this move, Müller’s work often creates, in Müller’s words, “a world which produces a state of constant exile, where [one is] banished from such comforting notions as ‘centre’ or ‘home.’” In a complete departure from Diane Arbus’ immersion into her subjects’ lives and Garry Winogrand’s invasive “street shots,” Müller subconsciously distances herself, physically and emotionally, from her subject. Müller emphasizes this isolation by pushing the physical distance to an extreme, often viewing the world from a bird’s-eye view. Müller places humans as the main operatives of her visual narrative, usually as a submissive bystander-victim to nature and shifts in societal desires. In combining these two elements, Müller projects her own feelings of disconnect and isolation upon her subject. In the process, Müller creates hauntingly beautiful reflections on the human experience and the unstable, shifting, and, at times, absurd stage upon which it plays.
Karin Apollonia Müller, Intersection, 1997
Karin Apollonia Müller, Morning Run, 1995
Angels in Fall, Müller’s first fully realized work and first after moving to Los Angeles, captures Müller’s sense of alienation at its height. At first glance, many of the images in Angels in Fall seem to be pleasant large scale urban and seaside landscapes; the colors are muted, the contrast is low, and even a trash pile seems harmless. However, upon closer inspection, the focus shifts from the landscape to the interaction of humans with these landscapes. Throughout the collection, Müller overwhelms her subjects with their surroundings, placing them as a tiny speck within these now-threatening settings. This spatial technique is most evident in Intersection, depicting a lone figure at a street corner in an eerily empty urban landscape. Müller further uses this scale to isolate two runners against an unusually dismal beach scene in Morning Run, and to assail a figure escaping highway traffic in Two Cold. Müller expands this scale to an entire landscape in Fog, by miniaturizing a vast urban coastline beneath a hazy sky. Although each image in Angels in Fall has a distinctly different feel, Müller’s images all exude her characteristic “state of constant exile,” through isolating and minimizing her subjects within contextually aggressive environments.
Karin Apollonia Müller, Two Cold, 1997
In Timeshots, Müller shifts the focus from humans to highlight their transient surroundings. Müller’s use of sequential images of urban landscapes, taken in the same location over a period of time, ironically exposes the instability both caused and feared by society. By emphasizing the changes between each image in a sequence, Müller also achieves broader social commentaries within each sequence. In her Civitas images, Müller shows the transition of a space on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, from its inception as an unassuming pile of discarded home goods and newspapers, to its final stages as a monstrous, jarring construction site almost engulfing the adjacent busy road. From the shift in lighting from muted to uneasily bright, to the slow death of the grass surrounding the site, Müller discredits society’s obsession with the new, showing that “new and improved” is not always “best.” In her Gap sequence, Müller shows a nondescript building beside a large road, with a rotation of Gap clothing ads changed out throughout each image; specifically, the subject of these ads range from the crisp classicism of blue jeans and black and white business wear, to “Sex-and-the-City gal”-chic with Sarah Jessica Parker. Through both the placement and transitioning of these ads, Müller pits the fashion industry, through its constant reinventions and blatant doctrinal methods, as media artillery, taking aim at the road. As the “artillery” fires, it unwillingly subjects the users of the road, more generally humankind, to whatever “fashion bullets” it chooses to fire. Through the changes between each image in these sequences, Müller shows her viewers a constantly transforming world of which humans are both victim and aggressor, justifying her disconnect and unfamiliarity with her surroundings.
- - Ben Haist
Karin Apollonia Müller, Civitas, c. 1997
