In her first book, Arbeit, Laura Bielau found monumental images of tiny things in her studio workspace. The notion of art and labor were at the fundament of the documents she produced. Everything from an empty Amazon envelope to a rubber band was magnified and challenged for their quotidian usage. Enlarged and brought into a sublime exhibition size, the prints, in their white minimalism, reflected a concentration on the long tradition of books about German work. From company photobooks to the broader careers of photographers like E.O. Hoppe, Timm Rautert, Chargesheimer, and Dr. Paul Wolff, through to James Welling’s magnificent Wolfsburg book, German work has been consulted from the inside and out, often through industry.
In her new book, Test, also published by Spector Books, Bielau’s conversation is darker toward factory farming and food processing, though the broader remit could be anthropomorphism. Like her predecessor, Michael Schmidt, whom she assisted, she has found the topic of food supply and distribution to resonate deeply. However, I might suggest a more primal affair that uses factory farming as a starting point but also ties contemporary corporate scientfic branding language into the mix. There is also a base animalism to the work in which Bielau shares intimate moments with her partner in bed. Suppose I were to speculate why it would be to associate the base material of organic life with the animals in situ, I might suggest that there is an ecological imbalance between species with humans terrorizing most of the other species on earth for their own use. It reminds one of the scene in the sitcom Peep Show where Mark, play acting as a WWII German soldier turns to his comrade and politely asks “What if we’re the baddies“. I could have this wrong; I am reading this without reading the press release. It is a book complete with abstract ways of pulling images together. It is also a difficult read for it and because of this one needs to spend time with it as on the surface it presents as a puzzle, but within the deconstruction the puzzle assembles into a clearer picture.
The images of the pigs in Bielau’s book present as sheltered, stepped-in digital noise and create an abject atmosphere that feels clandestine, unseen, filthy, and necrotic. I believe this is not a comment on the animal itself, but rather the conditions of the farm itself and the distance we find from the harvesting of food in the contemporary era. If I abstract that one step further, I can make the connection that the disparate ways human beings share the planet with other life forms may as well be at the forefront of the work. After all, the images are not only of swine but also share a more extensive agricultural dissemination. Insects also invade the frame, and a type of scientism can be seen in the pictures. Scientism is how I suggest the use of science in such projects like this or several Klaus Pichler’s books or Nicolas Polli’s The Ferox Archives, to name a few, which employ a scientific visualization of photography while acknowledging photography’s role to document/truth as tenuous. In this sense, photography itself becomes a laboratory of investigation.
It is a fantastic and even more progressive book that Arbeit, which I also loved. The work is angular and asks the viewer to treat the material with some understanding of how images operate together in 2024. The use of imperfect, failed, dissolved, granular, and stretched images, along with image screenshots from the Internet, make the book a profound testament to how our collective interpretation of symbols and pictures is morphing and changing, creating a new, nearly biological response to the unnerving consumer world of digital technology.
Perhaps we are the Test, not the animals or scientific theaters inside the book. A dark mirror presides. Here, George Orwell 12 Monkeys and the vestigial discussions of public virology all meet at a counterpoint Against Nature. Highly Recommended.
