Until Today by Ralf Peters

When I asked Hatje Cantz for a review copy of Ralf Peters's Until Now I did so because I felt attracted to his photographs of petrol stations. I liked that they were framed in such a way that they seemed to stand alone out there in the nowhere, I also liked their colours, and I liked their sterility.

Since I'm not really a fan of photographs that were basically done on a computer screen (for that, to me, is painting and not photographing), I wondered why I felt drawn to these pics. In search for answers I started to read Renate Puvogel's "Towards an Aesthetic of Cycles?", a text that can be found in the book and from which I learned that Peters "works almost exclusively in series" and that his pictures "are already conceived as series when he takes them." Renate elaborates: "The series Petrol Stations is an instance of how Peters is constantly examining symptoms of the Zeitgeist. And the serial form is particularly suited to posing questions about the standardization of daily life, globalization, and the loss of identity. The sense that we have lost control over our lives, that they have been reduced to a kind of anonymity, repeatedly features in Peters's work."

While I do agree that "the serial form is particularly suited to posing questions about the standardization of daily life, globalization, and the loss of identity", I'm not really sure how this connects to a photograph of a petrol station that has been altered with the help of a computer. In other words, I fail to see how a willfully decontextualised and altered picture can be a symbol of the Zeitgeist. Moreover, "the sense that we have lost control over our lives, that they have been reduced to a kind of anonymity" did not really come to mind when I was looking at these petrol stations.

Nevertheless, there was an expression in Renate's text that I felt was capturing something essential in regards to these photographs. She writes of "this rather Hopperian theme" - solitude - that these photographs radiate and I guess that this is indeed what they convincingly illustrate.

Yet this tome not only shows petrol stations but also supermarkets, portraits by night, a series called men/women, and much more; in fact, the 198 works in this volume provide "an overview of all the artist's series from 1995 up to the present day."

The ones that I liked best are the airport series (Salta, Seoul, Sar) that show views seen through the reflective window panes (not an easy task at all) from the arrival hall. Again Renate Puvogel: "The composition makes one think immediately of the artists of Constructivism or De Stijl (despite the fact that Piet Mondrian, for example, generally avoided green). In this series it becomes particularly clear that although an individual can work by itself, a series is a better way of developing a basic idea." I couldn't agree more.

Ralf Peters
UNTIL TODAY
Ed. Bernhard Knaus
Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2010