I am relatively new to Jochen Lempert’s work, or at least his books. I was aware of his book Phenomena from 2013, which seems a favorite among his fans and commands a decent price at auction. I tend to note these things to argue with or argue against about a book’s “weight” amongst the bevy of other books that elude such status. I also saw his work presented for London’s 2014 Deutsche Bourse award. I remember the darkroom prints, very lightly printed to the gallery wall, and thinking that the presentation matched the subject matter, which is rarely the case with photography, with many images slopped into some sandalwood frame, often hung over a piece of wall vinyl of another photographic image making a godawful mess of everything in sight. When will that end?

In the case of Lempert, I was not overly drawn to the work at the time. It was not where I was, and I felt the whispy nature of the printing and what read like a bog-standard set of biology textbook illustrations felt lacking. Admittedly, I was not into the subtlety or lyrical analytical framework. It also alluded to the standard reference to German typology, a trope I enjoyed at the time, so I was left with a room full of prints that felt poorly printed (not the case) and lacking any serious weight. It is the same way I felt toward Rinko Kawauchi’s work, though in the case of both artists, I have always understood why other people like it. A decade has passed, and though I still feel somewhat ambivalent about this methodology of making work, artists like Anders Edström have helped me develop a more sensitive approach to work that is incredibly subtle, bordering on twee at times.

My reaction to Lempert has changed quite a bit over the past years. Though I have not been able to track down a copy of Phenotype as of yet, I have managed to secure a copy of Natural Sources, his most recent book, published by the eminent Walther König, a publisher of very particular photobooks that often move into the realms of classic books on photography. With Natural Sources, I have scratched the nagging itch of wanting to dig into Lempert’s work. Though I might suggest that I do not believe my previous assessment of a lyrical type of analytic photography was incorrect, I do find, in their aggregate, something quite magical about the work in the book form. Perhaps the utility of the book form and its natural relationship to the subject matter of Lempert’s work has opened the door for me. Maybe it is that I do not enjoy exhibitions, particularly award exhibitions, and in having time to understand the flow of material in the book, something lacking has shifted toward something more profound in my reading of the work. It might also be that a decade of aging (not growth) has levied a more plausible usage in the images for me to gravitate toward the work.

Mostly, the book is sequenced with a thoughtful bevy of images that collude and resonate with one another. There is an emphasis on the natural world. Though I could be wrong, I am pretty sure some of these images have surfaced in his other books, making their usage flexible, an attribute that I am starting to revere in artists working with books, who feel confident repeating images that they used before to get the job done. This lacks technique and should be explored more as it helps destroy the canon of serialization and “bodies” of work that the market and university systems push as a working methodology. Why should we constantly abandon former images when they can be used to pursue a new and interesting iteration of work? With the sequencing of Natural Sources, the book functions like a biological textbook without text. Though not encyclopedic the way Phenotype probably is, there are many images. Some, including the lamb’s sinister silhouette, find their non-silhouetted double in other works. The horse in Natural Sources, a photographic print re-photographed with an elegant shadow passing its surface, perhaps from a gallery wall, also reverberates past motivations and morphs into a new and complex work arrangement between archive and serendipity.

In Lempert’s work, there is something quietly ecstatic about how he observes the world in its micro-order, often de-centralizing the anthropocentrist visions at the root in much of what is produced, making the work relatively unique. Though I would not want to go through the onus of ecology on top of his methodology, it is hard not to see this as a hymn or elegy for the natural world when it was produced. His installations, constellations as they are often referred to, also pin aside allusions to this type of ecological thinking, and perhaps his ability to transmute the photographic print back to the natural referrant is one of the work’s strongest points. I want to champion Natural Sources. Its tidy minimalism and Lempert’s steadfast vision are lacking in much of what is produced these days. That has the knock-on effect of making one consider the natural order as a bonus. Highly Recommended.