I did not want to use Bladerunner as an analogy for this photobook simply because the title implies an association. I find nothing immediate in the book that relates the film to Uta’s miasmatic and crepuscular photographs. However, I could marginally make that leap if I wanted to chalk the images up to having a science-fiction aesthetic. That stated I would have to outline what science-fiction looks like in photography, and apart from some vague notion that it implies machinery or something to do with human cloning, the results would be frustrating without a spaceship to make the allegory work. I do not believe that was her intention, either. Instead, I want to think about the artist’s work in general terms, her penchant for bookmaking, and the idea of correlating these images to mourning, loss, and the confines of the healing process that occurs during the time that one re-examines and purges those complex sentiments from the position of post-trauma.
With Uta, speaking about her work related to world-building is vital. I was fortunate enough to work with the artist during a workshop in 2019. I was pretty taken with Uta’s images then, and what struck me as even more essential was her ability to make photobooks on her own at her local printer, which were pretty exceptional if, like Replikant, her book published recently by Witty Books with support from PHMuseum, were a bit chaotic. I never knew what led Uta to craft these mysterious and dark images she presented in book form. I remember speaking with her about her son, but I do not believe she mentioned anything in her backstory about the death of her lover in 1985 that led to the making of Replikant, which, in hindsight, makes much more sense.
In the chaos of her new book, specific motifs return repeatedly. There is a concentration on abstraction and immersion through the book’s large format and the sequence’s unrest, which feels claustrophobic and uncertain. Regarding uncertainty, this is enforced by Uta’s color photographs that oscillate from a gem-like saturation to cooled monochromatic uses of a single color. There is a distinct feel of digital photography at play. I mention this as many of these low-lit images would be difficult to capture otherwise unless they were fragments harvested from a screen, and if that were the case, I could rethink the science-fiction claims a bit more. This does not matter in the more significant conversation regarding the work. Still, it could be a reason for how the work presides over a feeling of being locked in by a type of futurism, however dystopian. There is undoubtedly some appropriation at play here. I suspect there are crops of existing images that Uta finds attractive that she puts into negative, or crops through blur to render the apparent qualities of appropriation more hushes such as grain, glare, and uneven sutures found in billboard paneling.
What holds the work together is the psychological glue of the artist’s subconscious. It does not matter where the images are purloined from, but they reflect Uta as much as any topic that inspires the press release. In the press release regarding the book, the artist speaks about losing her former boyfriend through an unfortunate car crash, and Replikant seems to be about that experience but also the harnessing of her dreams, which haunted her in the aftermath of her loss. It is worth quoting from the press release here at length as it is autobiographical…
Recently, I discovered an old folder with many handwritten pages; they were all dreams I had written down in 1985 because they seemed important to me. At that point, I had just lost my first great love in a car accident and had withdrawn from the world, living in my tiny apartment like in a dark cave, avoiding contact with other people, the television on for hours until the end of broadcasting. I was terrified to fall asleep because then the dreams came, the nightmares, in which a white Mercedes Benz was slowly chasing me down a lonely country road, or I heard a voice from a ditch, from a crashed car, it was him calling for help, but I suspected he was trying to lure and capture me.
After some months, I started to look forward to it; I learned that I could control my dreams, my boyfriend seemed to be stuck in a kind of in-between world, and I could meet him there at night if I wanted. REPLIKANT shows my nocturnal adventures from this time. When I went out one winter evening and met a new man, my dreams disappeared, and I never saw my lover again.- Ute Genilke
In suggesting an ability to control dreams, the artist asks us to understand her experience as empowerment through loss. There is a question within about how mourning can give, through the experience of coping, some form of minor superpowers when the will to continue and accept loss is resolved and can then be used as a spiritual token to carry in the liminal breast pocket, removed in times of stress and doubt to get through the morass of life, imagined and real. What makes the passage she penned even more interesting is that these powers can be diluted when one finds the healing that allows them to move forward. Replikant is about this state of uncertainty manufactured through loss. It is a proverbial walk through a universal understanding of pain, recall, and memory. In this, no matter how sci-fi her images may be, they are nuggets of authenticity, and they suggest a pressing humanity that gives insight into how to cope.
Through the chaos of the images, a clearer picture of the world’s order begins to emerge. It suggests a fleeting temporality, a nod to confusion, and a way to push through the dark recesses that it offers us. I find this very inspiring, which is part of my reason for wanting to drop the baggage of sci-fi, as this does not feel otherworldly nor elicit my concern for something far removed from my struggles with losing loved ones. It instead confirms what I know to be true: that there is nothing more strange or hectic than life itself, with its ungoverned grace held in peril, at times, by its solicitations for us to remember our mortality. Uta’s book is a memento mori. It reminds us of how fantastic everything is and how short our window of time is held at the apex to enjoy it through creativity, other people, and our imagination. I recommend this book for those looking for something that deals with death and loss in somewhat abstract terms. There is a longing within the work, which is a challenging emotion to conjure up in pictures.
In other parallels to work being made in photobook form, it is worth mentioning Rita Lino’s book Replicant, which bridges more the sci-fi concept that I hold at bay with Uta’s work. The two books are not similar in aesthetic terms, but a natural bridge can be made from the title. In visual terms, the images remind me of some of Cristiano Volk’s book Laissez-Faire, another book where the digital quality of image-making feels clear and present. I think the design works quite well in critically thinking about the photobook. There is a magazine quality to the format that I feel fits the dark gloss of the images.
On a note of slight constructive criticism, I think there could have been a slightly stronger choice of sequencing flow. There is a disjointed feel to the flow of the images that I do not think was used to enhance the feeling of a liminal state, but rather, is part of the difficulty of projects where the single image takes precedence over the whole of the book form. It is one of many solutions, but with a slightly stronger edit, there would be a more coherent flow. This stated, I also have seen enough of Uta’s work to know that this is part of her way of making images. I am most interested in what might happen if there was a more organized play between color and the dark bulk of the images. I see where men resurface as an adage to longing, but I am curious if isolating these elements away from full bleed might proffer a different viewing of these images. In either event, it is a vital book, and I am happy to see Uta get the credit she deserves for working with a great publisher for Replikant.
Uta Genilke
Replikant
Witty Books