Kaspar Lumen

My radically distorted photographs explore the limits of recognizability. Viewed up close, they deconstruct themselves and dissolve into structures that reveal their own aesthetic quality. I am fascinated by the question up to which point we discard a visual stimulus as non-representational noise and when we try to conceptualize and interpret it as something meaningful. The result of this epistemic process reveals more about the recipient’s subjective construction than about the supposedly objective reality. The photos therefore undermine the representational character of photography and thus question one of its fundamental principles.

The large-sized images are based on photographs taken with a smartphone. Due to the low resolution, this deliberately chosen methodological approach makes the restriction to a minimum of visual information a point of principle right from the moment of shooting. In a complex and highly experimental process, the raw material is then distorted to a point of almost being unrecognizable.

I refer to this type of minimalist photography as epsilontics.

Kaspar Lumen lives and works in Berlin. As a philosopher (born in 1979), he has researched the limits of knowledge and wrote his doctoral thesis on the constitution of worldviews. As a self-taught photographer, he has pursued artistic projects with a consistently interdisciplinary approach for many years. His photographic works always derive from an engagement with philosophical and epistemological questions. Kaspar Lumen develops a unique position and calls into question traditional principles of photography in a profound way, precisely because he is an outsider to the art world.