In “No Hit Wonder,” Volker Renner draws connections between pictures, music, and memories. He matches photographs from his image archive to titles of songs one would call one-hit wonders. Firmly lodged in the collective memory, the tunes will come to mind as one looks at the pictures—or be heard thanks to the enclosed Spotify playlist—and prompt manifold associations. As though in a musical or mental loop, the pictures recur in the three volumes, though with changes of detail and different songs: vol. I presents the original image; vol. II, a chosen segment of it; and vol. III, the void left by the manipulation of the photograph. The blanks become projection screens, echoes and recollections of pictures that play like songs on the “screen of the mind.”

The photographs in Volker Renner’s artist’s book “Hop On Hop Off” were taken during sightseeing tours through big cities. Boarding a variety of tourist buses, the artist transforms into a mobile surveillance camera that negates sights and trains its lens on moving targets. In the perspective of the wheeled flaneur, the cityscape’s impervious surfaces fuse into an amalgam of pedestrians, car hoods, and asphalt, for which fossilized sunshine was cast into its definitive form. Renner sends concrete studies rather than picture postcards and Captcha images rather than Instagram motifs, blurring the distinction between human and machine and leaving the beholder dizzy and disoriented.

“Bildsammler,” or “Picture Collector,” is what Volker Renner might print on his business card, as each new item in his series of artists’ books may be read as another chapter in a single huge collection comprising found as well as photographed images. For his twenty-sixth book, he has compiled pages from collector’s albums, a medium that became popular in the mid-nineteenth century and for over a century and a half blended a consumer’s approach to knowledge with knowledgeable consumerism. Pasting collectible pictures into their albums, children and adults learned about art, animals, and the world while also learning to love the right brands and department stores. What interests the artist in these “picture collectors” is not so much the completed and perfectly preserved copy as rather the multiple authorship of everyone who helped shape a particular album. Marginal notes, flagrant gaps, and manifold traces of destruction make the collector’s album a unique artifact and cultural-historical phenomenon. With the serial arrangement of various albums and targeted creative interventions, Renner puts his co-authorial stamp on the volumes’ design and brings the systems of knowledge and classification implicit in them into the present.

In his twenty-fifth artist’s book, Volker Renner adapts the courtroom drama genre. On the movie screen, the latter is defined by its heavy reliance on dialogue; Renner, by contrast, lets the pictures speak. And it was images, not words, that moved the millions who, through twenty-five days of proceedings, seized on the opportunity to watch the livestream of the trial pitting Johnny Depp against Amber Heard on Court TV, YouTube, or various other social media channels. Both the ex–husband and wife’s media-savvy self-dramatization and the viewers’ reactions and comments grew to hitherto unseen dimensions. The two actors’ private lives were staged for all to see, reality-show-style, as though as based on a secret screenplay. In “Ein Prozess,” Volker Renner now opens the pages of that storyboard.

Each day of the hearings and trial in 2021 and 2022 is the subject of a dedicated chapter in which the artist has the principal characters appear in film stills he extracted from the recordings from the trial. Hewing to a rigorously documentary approach, he compiles a visual transcript of the presentation of evidence, making it accessible to a discourse analysis that, in the Foucauldian tradition, investigates not just language but above all the language of images. Even the allegation that prompted the trial concerned the damage to a star’s public image, rather than a truth that could be borne out by evidence: more than anything else, it is images that are seen and read today and that, in being seen and read, exert the greatest power imaginable in the struggle over what is right and fair. The jury agreed with a public majority in finding in Johnny Depp’s favor. A matter of performance?

Volker Renner, the collector and recycler of found photographs, has tapped a new source: the website “Faces of the Riot,” which went online within weeks after the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. It gathers a large number of the faces of people who presumably participated in the assault on democracy. What makes the material explosive is that it comes from the alleged perpetrators themselves. It was they who uploaded their private shots to sites like the social media platform “Parler,” bragging about their acts before a like-minded audience. Far from serving as a gallery of profiles in courage, however, “Faces of the Riot” is effectively a contemporary version of the medieval pillory. In the tradition of the Wild West’s “Most Wanted” posters, the site has helped the FBI elicit information on suspects. The hunters find themselves hunted. Yet this practice also raises questions of legality and concerns about surveillance by algorithms.

In “potential sightings,” Volker Renner condenses the more than 5,000 “Faces of the Riot” into a portrait of horror and outrage. Focusing on the blurred pictures, he refuses to endorse the material’s forensic potential and instead underscores its inhuman and alien aspect. The phrase “potential sighting” is typically associated with beings from outer space, animals, or people who are presumed dead. The failure of facial recognition, meanwhile, suffuses the images with a painterly and abstract quality that brings to mind depictions of pain in Edvard Munch or Francis Bacon.

“Gewinner” is Volker Renner’s smallest book to date but, at 384 pages, not the slimmest. It’s coming out on occasion of the visual arts working fellowship from the City of Hamburg that the artist received in 2018. Like a flipbook, it shows photographs of people who won money in Las Vegas, symbolized by an oversized check. The artist clipped the photos from a casino’s promotional brochure and arranged them in order. But the pictures don’t dance the way they would in a normal flipbook. Defeating the expectations we bring to the format, they don’t tell a story of hitting it big and living happily ever after. Only the letters behind the pictures spell the word G-E-W-I-N-N-E-R, or “winners.” The small book comes in a slipcase designed as a facsimile of the casino brochure. It’s a case of “misleading advertising,” just as, in all likelihood, every one of the winners in the pictures will come out a loser: in the end, it’s always the casino that wins. As in his earlier book “Wie war Las Vegas,” Renner explores the manifestations of the “fake” and the ways in which expectations are dashed. Including his own: whether a fellowship is really the jackpot, that is the question this book raises.

The Artificial World on Lindenstraße and Its Distinctions by Merle Radtke

Lindenstraße has been lighting up television screens across Germany since December 8, 1985, making it the country’s longest-running weekly series. The show is set in a world unto itself that, Sunday after Sunday, is the scene of stories of every stripe. One plot strand ties in with the next; characters move from one apartment to another, sharing homes, beds, and breakfast tables in constantly shifting constellations. It’s everyone with everyone—in love, engaged, married, separated, divorced, widowed, rinse and repeat. Everything happens in close quarters, under the watchful eyes of lovely loose-lipped neighbors, who can generally be relied on to put in their two cents’ worth. The web of relationships has grown only denser over time, and it’s become difficult to keep track of who’s related to whom and how. Some plotlines have evolved over years or even decades; the Beimer, Zenker, and Beimer-Ziegler families have stuck around through all of them.

Produced by Hans W. Geißendörfer, Lindenstraßedoesn’t portray the glitzy world of the rich and beautiful, instead offering up a cross-section of society. The stories revolve around the everyday lives of the residents and reflect the problems of a middle-class society in which moments of joy dependably alternate with strokes of misfortune. Grappling with real-world social as well as political issues and discourses of its day from the very first episode, the show has made German television history for over three decades. The series broke taboos with characters like the openly gay Carsten Flöter, the AIDS patient Benno Zimmermann, and the lesbian Tanja Schildknecht and featured plots around unemployment, teen pregnancy, the challenges of adolescence, marriage crises, the difficulties of old age, social differences, racism, nationalism, environmentalism, and gentrification.

AlthoughLindenstraßeis set in Munich, the only take that was actually shot there is the panorama of the Bavarian capital’s inner city with which each episode opens. The rest of the show is recorded on the premises of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s studios in Cologne-Bocklemünd, where sets simulate the microcosm along Lindenstraße. The titular street itself is mostly lined by hollow façades without any life behind them; only Café Bayer and the gym, plus the shisha bar, hair salon, and Café George on side streets called Kastanienstraße und Ulrike-Böss-Straße, whose interiors are visible from the streets through large windows, have been built out to make them suitable for shooting. All other interior photography happens at two studios, which house the sets for the apartments at Lindenstraße no. 3, plus the staircase that was cleaned for many years by Else Kling, the guardian of decency and good morals; the Sarikakis family’s Greek restaurant Akropolis; Villa Dressler, where Dr. Iris Brooks has her family practice; and the apartments at Kastanienstraße no. 26 and the converted loft inhabited by the wealthy developer Wolf Lohmaier. Most of the elaborately designed sets represent entire apartments, allowing the actors to move freely throughout the rooms, among patterned sofa cushions, curtains, tablecloths, pillows, bedspreads, woolen blankets, wallpapers, carpets, crocheted doilies, shower curtains, tiles, and shower mats. The homes are equipped with most of the fixtures and props one would expect to find there, and so the action can unfold quite naturally, making a lot less work for the editing phase, as when a character begins his day by brushing his teeth in the bathroom, walks down the hallway to the bedroom to get dressed and then to the kitchen for a quick sip of coffee before rushing out the door and closing it behind himself. The last bit is feasible in those apartments that are connected to the staircase, or more properly, to its mockup. Only some of them allow actors to pay a visit to the neighbors across the landing or chat through open doors, whereas others are utterly disconnected from the stairs and in fact located in a distant corner of the studio.

The most recent outdoor setting to be added to the homes and stores around Lindenstraße in June 2019 is a construction trailer on an empty lot that’s manifestly meant to contrast with the developer’s loft apartment and the boutique hotel under construction at Lindenstraße no. 5. Faced with the threat of gentrification, the cast of Lindenstraßehave sprung into action to defend their neighborhood. Dramatizations of capitalism and alternative culture clash and are played off against each other. The loft apartment with its designer furniture and hip racing bicycle is so spotlessly clean as to feel a little sterile, whereas the trailer, which features only the most basic amenities, is messy and a bit grubby. In short, the one as much as the other are fitted out exactly as one would imagine them, down to the cobblestone, cracked padlock, black woolen hat, and gloves that are tokens of the radicalism of the trailer’s occupant, the nineteen-year-old Mika Arlen. The accoutrements are like the pieces of a picture puzzle.

Scenes and actions are interdependent; the crew can shoot only what can take place in the existing spaces or must build the settings the action requires. The staircase of the building at Lindenstraße no. 3, where neighbors frequently run into each other, say hello, and exchange gossip about what’s been going on in their house, is a separate set complete with a main door and entrance, access to the elevators, and mailboxes—a meeting spot for the residents and important hub where storylines that have so far played out within the four walls of one apartment can be shared with the community, with potential ramifications. Moreover, the staircase as a public or semi-public space is especially suited for the dissemination of messages that are relevant to audiences beyond the extended family unit. Most of the mailboxes, for instance, are emblazoned with “No Nazi Mail” stickers, one of several subversively placed talking points. A banner with the words “Sea Rescue Is Not a Crime” points to another hot-button issue in German politics and society today. With both statements, it’s impossible to decide whether they express the production team’s stance or are merely decorative additions designed to heighten the credibility of the sceneries. One can’t be sure on which plane of reality such communication is taking place or how the messages will be received by viewers.

The fact that the sets include entire apartments rather than just disconnected rooms means that the actors don’t need to face the camera from the same unvarying angles. Instead of acting as though on a stage, they roam their quarters just like they would at home, although movable walls are occasionally removed during filming operations to get a better shot or to set up locales that aren’t permanent installations; the Greek restaurant Akropolis and the Villa Dressler, for example, exist in alternation to save space. Another curious technical detail is that some objects are itinerant. Washing machines move from one apartment to another, and since several apartments don’t have fully equipped bathrooms, a visitor traipsing around behind the scenes, between the apartments, may come across bathtubs full of assorted props. None of this is visible to the viewers. Now and then, a bit of artifice is necessary to maintain the construct; note, for instance, the blurry pictures of “neighboring buildings” that are mounted behind the windows. And of course the crew keeps a close watch to ensure that the viewers don’t pick up on the fact that the interiors don’t have ceilings. Still, gaffes are inevitable; one continuity error that attentive viewers could hardly have failed to notice is that there are apartments on the fifth floor of the house at Lindenstraße no. 3, with buzzers to match on the doorbell nameplate, but the façade is that of a four-floor building. This particular inconsistency, however, is more likely to elicit a smile from fans than to make them doubt the show’s credibility.

TheLindenstraßemicrocosm is brought to life by the many minor details that lend the action its distinctive zip. For instance, over the years, the show’s writers have created a host of fictional brands, including “Ziegenstädter” (beer), “Lindener” (mineral water), and a women’s magazine called “Karlotta.” Other products are altered versions of real-world counterparts; the potato chip flavor, for example, is said to be “Serbo-Croatian” rather than “Hungarian.” Moreover, to allow the stories to stay relevant to contemporary life, the writers contrived a parallel digital universe complete with its own search engine, dating platform, and social networking site. These are part of the artificial world of Lindenstraße, as are the more or less up-to-date references to emerging trends: there was a startup called “Tischlein Klick Dich,” characters brewed craft beer, and the Akropolis’s menu boasted a “Gyro Smoothie with Tzatziki Topping.” Again, it’s hard to tell whether these somewhat awkward attempts to keep up with the times are meant to pad out the scenography or part of a brilliantly orchestrated character development strategy; they may also be read as commenting on the way trends suddenly appear out of nowhere and are hyped. Either way, the show’s creators recognizably make every effort to keep building a richly diverse and internally consistent fictional cosmos.

Strolling through the sets is an experience that resembles a visit to a furniture discounter: you step from one casually groomed model home into another, leapfrogging among realities. A different way of life presents itself behind each apartment door, manifest not just in the actors’ performances, but also in the interiors, in the objects that are scattered about. What makes a tour of the studio very different from the presentation of interior design styles at a furniture store, though, is that these aren’t serving suggestions; the point is not to sell as many products from the line of merchandise as possible but to portray different realities with maximum naturalism. The placement of objects and their constellations breathe life into the rooms—plates with cookies, open books, empty beer bottles, the makeup compact with its lid flipped open, the filter paper in the open coffeemaker, the laundry in the washer, the crowded sinks and mirror shelves of the family bathrooms suggest a bustling life that has only just left the room—in fact, the sets occasionally feel like crime scenes. Shoes in the hallway might have been flung into the corner mere seconds ago, and very similar associations are invited by clothes on beds or the floor or hanging over chairs. Some of these glimpses into other people’s lives are oddly intimate, especially when the visitor tiptoes through the apartments while their residents are out, steps into the walk-in closets, peeks into the parents’ or the child’s bedrooms, where an unmade bed beckons or the sofa that has been readied for an overnight guest.

Before the performers even begin to say their lines, the sets tell part of the story. It’s the little details that, in the absence of the actors, present themselves to the visitor’s eyes as still lifes, as motifs fraught with significance. In Anna Ziegler’s apartment, the empty half of the marital bed bears mute witness to the late Hans Beimer. The most basic means dramatize his absence: a pillow and a bedspread, both neatly laid out on one side of the bed rather than wadded up at the center. Beimer’s place is vacant, waiting to be occupied by someone else. Photos of the extended family above the sofa are reminders of happier days. But life doesn’t stop, can’t be frozen in time, as the plush toys and yellow rubber boots lying around indicate; they belong to the family’s youngest son. In other apartments, family photographs chart the web of relationships between the house’s residents and reveal that several actors who made their debut on the show as children have grown up on television. Pictures also capture biographical turning points or bring back memories of blows of fate, as with the wedding image showing Helga Beimer and her second husband, Erich Schiller, on the wall in the Beimer/Zenker household, a memento of Helga’s life after her divorce from her Hansemann and the new happiness she found, which would last until Schiller’s death in December 2015. References to characters who’ve moved away from Lindenstraße and calamities as well as joyful occasions are cherished by the show’s longtime fans, whom they remind of key events, of weddings and funerals, of actors who’ve left the cast.

The props tell stories or help tell them, but sets and accoutrements also serve to flesh out Lindenstraße’s characters and support their development. Habits, possessions, and lifestyle choices mark an individual as a member of a particular social group. The characters are equipped with attributes that signify their background, relationship and social status, profession, hobbies, and interests. Pieces of furniture are employed as iconographic tokens of their personal circumstances, of differences of taste and lifestyle. Lindenstraßestages the distinctions described by Pierre Bourdieu, putting them into practice in the design of the characters’ habitats. The French sociologist argued that taste is not a matter of individual preferences but always molded by society and its entrenched structures. Subtle distinctions are especially evident in the objects that lend themselves to comparison because they’re found in all apartments. Note, for example, the different coffee brewers: the venerable if slightly battered specimen of the good old drip coffeemaker, the Italian moka pot, the sleekly designed Moccamaster. Or consider the shoes, tidily lined up or haphazardly stuffed into shoe racks or simply left on the floor in the hallway; their brands and conditions, too, provide insight into the residents’ ways of life. Another medium is the selection of pictures that adorn the walls: original works or reproductions, Old Master paintings, works from the nineteenth century—the art of Monet is especially popular—or children’s drawings and family photographs. Then there are the books, the leather-bound tomes and classical authors at Villa Dressler, the lavish art books in the loft, the romance novels, paperbacks, or comic books in other homes. And discerning eyes can even learn something about the residents from the condition of the floors, the choice of surfacing, the freshly painted or scuffed walls, clues that people recently moved into a gut-renovated apartment or have been living in theirs for many years, that they never got around to renovating or didn’t have the time or, maybe, the money to do it.

Lindenstraßeenacts stereotypes with some descriptive basis, relying on everyday knowledge that’s memorable and visual. To portray the characters, the show’s makers resort to stuff that makes the obvious even more obvious. The Dagdelens’ home is littered with little coverlets, there are patterned fabrics everywhere, a lone tea glass, a nazar amulet (also known as Turkish eye), a mosque-shaped alarm clock, and pistachio and sunflower seed shells—the mise-en-scène of the family’s “Turkishness” is excessive, almost ludicrously so, and once again it’s hard to say whether it’s meant to flesh out the role of Lisa Dagdelen or reflects the set designers’ preconceptions. Lindenstraßeoperates with widely shared ideas about members of certain groups that allow the viewers to categorize the characters based on the objects around them while also encouraging identification. The residents’ lives are pieced together as though from a model kit. In Klaus and Neyla Beimer’s kitchen, organic groceries, a tajine, an Asian teapot, a rich assortment of spices, and several varieties of cheese in the fridge announce that they’re conscious shoppers and enthusiastic cooks and probably not content with the plain German fare on which Klaus’s mother raised him. Their household is also well stocked with books, and the journalist’s study suggests the issues he’s currently working on, with glimpses of his most recent research. Urban development and planning seem to be a major interest. A black-and-white photograph on the wall dates from the days of the Occupy movement and hints at his political convictions. Like Mika Arlen, he appears to take a critical view of capitalism and its unfettered power, though he doesn’t express his opposition the way the construction-trailer dweller does.Lindenstraßestages a variety of lives, portraying individuals from different strata of society and capturing a range of political mindsets. The residents confront the same challenges, but from different positions and with different attitudes, and so the show addresses selected issues from a variety of angles in what can feel like didactic fashion.

The Lindenstraßemicrocosm can seem peculiar, yet the parallels with the real world outside the sets in Cologne-Bocklemünd are stronger than one might think. Concerns that the series has grappled with over the years are by no means obsolete, making this world of make-believe uncomfortably relevant to ours. If you disregard the kidnappings, murders, attacks, etc.—in short, the exaggerations that are to be expected in a TV production—Lindenstraßeis distinguished by its considerable realism, in no small part thanks to the sets and expert use of props. More than virtually any other show, it has systematically rendered stereotypes of German society from the very first episode. Yet this chapter in television history is drawing to a close. After almost thirty-five years, Lindenstraße will be discontinued: a fixture of German entertainment will be killed off.

Merle Radtke

Pension Schlange turns the mechanics of classic animal photography on its head. Instead of waiting for hours until the animal to be captured shows itself, this photographer hangs on until it skulks off, allowing its terrain to appear for what it is: a display case designed by humans, a staged nature with sculptural or abstract qualities.

The interest is in the simulation, the fake: the artificial as the cultural constant that is in evidence throughout and a defining characteristic of our contemporary society of the spectacle. Historically speaking, the zoo, as the ancestor of today’s theme and amusement parks, was where culture and nature first encountered each other in such direct confrontation, and it continues to inform how we relate to animals.

For several days in early July 2017, the sky over Hamburg swarmed with dozens of helicopters. They ferried guests of state to the G20 summit and kept an eye on the city’s residents and the protesters. And they made any normal conversation impossible: the noise was monstrous. All day and all night, the deployment of these aircraft was above all a demonstration of violent power, the act of an all-controlling state seeking to cow those below—in short, an obnoxious sight and an ear-shattering form of intimidation.

Volker Renner turned the surveillance around, aiming his camera at the summer sky to record the different types of helicopter and localize their booming appearances.

For the ill-fated summit’s anniversary, he has created a series of 20 postcards that come resting on two packs of Ohropax earplugs. The date, time, helicopter type, and GPS data are listed on the back.

Right on time for the 2018 football world cup, Volker Renner is bringing out his riposte to the conventional collectible card album. His artist’s book Heldenteilepays homage to the multipart posters that ran in the German magazine KICKER and to the format’s heroes, the only humans to deserve life-size depiction on the walls of teenagers’ bedrooms everywhere. For the 1974 world cup, the first to be held in Germany, KICKER featured the German team’s star players—Günter Netzer, Jürgen Grabowski, and, needless to say, Franz “The Emperor” Beckenbauer. Renner’s volume brings them back in all their glory: bulging calves, divine hands, unruly manes, and man’s greatest treasure, all neatly dissected, as in a collection of ancient sculptures or at the supermarket meat counter. Yet to solve the puzzle and resurrect the champions of yore, you’ll need two copies of the booklet (for the front and back sides); as a special highlight for collecting aficionados, they come with two different covers.

Created in 1952, Jackson Pollock’s “Convergence” is one of the American artist’s most famous drip paintings. It first came out as a jigsaw puzzle in 1964. Then one of the world’s most difficult puzzles at a mere 340 pieces, it has sold more than 100,000 copies over the decades. Today’s puzzle devotees have the choice of a 1000-piece edition that would seem to make defeat inevitable. Or would it? Give it a shot and you’ll begin to feel the puzzle’s appeal, but you’ll also grasp the unusual challenge it poses: you’ll spot five matching pieces on a good day and not a single one on a bad day—the picture is just too jumbled, the details too apparently unconnected. On amazon.com, one reviewer warns would-be buyers: “May lead to insanity in previously sane people; may bring sanity to previously insane people.” Perhaps the puzzle might have helped Jackson Pollock cope with his mental health issues? More likely, however, it’ll drive previously well-adjusted puzzlers mad and acquaint them with utter futility. What’s certain is that it’ll teach them to look hard: painstaking comparison of the reproduction’s different layers is the only way to solve the riddle. With his new artist’s book, Volker Renner offers a training course in such “comparative seeing.” For “Reconstructing Jackson Pollock,” the artist placed each individual piece of the puzzle on a canvas and took its photograph. Instead of assembling the pieces, he has arranged them in the format that is characteristic of his approach more generally: the sequence. This makes the pieces not only pictures but also a metaphor for photography itself: a photograph never represents more than a segment of the larger totality of reality, and how it relates to other such segments is a question that fuels ongoing debates but—like the Pollock puzzle—is never definitively resolved.

artial overview of meanings:

1. denoting the people of Persia; Iranians

2. (colloquial) short for: Persian carpet

3. one of the great tragedies by the Greek poet Aeschylus

Volker Renner’s most recent artist’s book “Die Perser” is the fruit of a trip to Iran. It opens with shots of Persian rugs Renner gleaned in carpet stores. Instead of the traditional motifs one might expect, they show baroque salon situations and Kinkadian landscapes that, before Renner’s lens, blur into a catalogue of absurdities. His black-and-white reproductions of the carpets, intended as wall hangings for the domestic sphere, make them look like old engravings, taking the interplay between original and counterfeit, art and kitsch, tradition and the contemporary world a notch further. From the tapestries his gaze then roams the private interior, where he discovers additional forms of simulation and simulacra such as pieces of fruit transmuted into plastic or ceramic logs of wood for the fireplace. The artist’s camera turns the decorative fake firewood into archaeological finds from the glorious era of the Persian Wars, prompting him to head out of doors, where his gaze glances off any object of interest, hitting walls or losing itself in the sky: in public settings, everything, including photography, is subject to regulation. Renner responds to the prohibition on photography by including blocked views in his book, revealing the stark contrast between interior and exterior, pictorial wall hanging and reality, comedy and tragedy.

Call them readymades: plastic food replicas (manufactured for food photographers?) out of which Volker Renner has assembled a visual ode to German cuisine that may well ruin your appetite. The eggs, now hardboiled, now sunny side up; the veal sausages with ketchup on cardboard plates; the meat loaf: they’re not just made of the same material, they’re also all fakes. Nothing about them is genuine, as Renner highlights in pairs of pictures showing them in the original packaging, then unwrapped. Picking up on two trends on social networks, “f for food” combines the urge to capture even the most trivial meal with the protagonists’ dressing and undressing for no discernible reason for an irresistible concoction: you are what you eat, or vice versa. The clean and cool shots in the book—sold, appropriately, in its own plastic wrapper—recall pictograms or fast-food joint menu boards. Their anonymous look also raises the question of the artist’s authorship, an issue Orson Welles probed in his last documentary film, whose title inspired Renner: “F for Fake.” It’s a dizzying prospect: Might Renner’s authorship be a forgery, too?

http://www.josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_f_for_food

The blurriness that pervades this artist’s book by Volker Renner starts right with the title: the Dutch “aangeschoten” is colloquial for “tipsy” but, more literally, also means “wounded by a shot,” alcoholic or otherwise. It’s a fine line that separates those two states, and here Renner walks that fine line with his camera: “Who hasn’t been there—after a long night in a strange city, too tired to go to bed, too awake to keep going, you drag yourself past the scenes of the evening before or the morning. Sometimes the only thing that helps in this peculiar mood is a visit to one of the world’s most incredible museums.” Renner’s pictures blend the night’s drunken revelry with his tour of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: as though hit by a projectile, teetering and about to pass out, he roams the galleries of the painting and bust collections and carries off the images. What he sees turns into a vision without beginning or end, coming to life, breaking the frame, overflowing the book’s pages until the viewer, too, feels pretty “aangeschoten.” Meanwhile, the photographer himself gets out of line, attracting the museum attendants’ attention. They shake their heads: not a single sharp picture! Are the Old Masters exacting revenge for the thousands of photographs their works are made to pose for day after day?

http://josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_aangeschoten#image-1

The brown and slightly greasy patent-leather cover brings back memories of family albums that were antiquated long before we got old. Nowadays such heirlooms end up in the trash, at a flea market, or on eBay—not unlike photobooks or vintage prints, they are coveted by collectors. Volker Renner’s “ALBUM” investigates the various ways in which anonymous private album photographs are presented on these sales platforms. It opens with empty black album pages; only the empty photo corners indicate that something has vanished. Such evanescence and the voids it leaves are a leitmotif throughout the book. Renner employs typical gimmicks people use to gussy up their wares for eBay only to point up their absurdity: spaghetti are stretched across pictures, tourist attractions are blacked out, and semitransparent cover sheets reveal themselves to be the true protagonists. The result is an achingly beautiful hymn to a formerly cherished family treasure stripped of its magic and intimacy by public exposure, demotion to a mere commodity, and—perhaps most grievously—digitization.

http://www.josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_album#image-1

The King’s Beards or Hair. As a tribute to Elvis Presley on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of his death, Volker Renner stages the King as a collectible silhouette complete with the beard he never wore. The lips and famous hip swing are missing, but the hairline and above all the forelock are unmistakable. Elvis’s haircut is an early example of the pop icon trademark feature; many other heads would follow. Yet he, too, may have emulated earlier stars—the quiff bears a dangerous resemblance to that sported by Captain Marvel, Jr., an eternally youthful superhero, exactly what Elvis wanted to become and became. Conscious of the fact that Elvis was actually blond, making his hair just as fake as a fake beard, Renner’s game of mistaken identities plays out in color and black-and-white.

http://www.josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_4040

“You don’t truly know what your homeland is to you until you’ve traveled to faraway places,” a German saying has it. In his artist’s book But Pedro’s a pony, Volker Renner, who usually travels far and wide to take pictures, probes the idea of “Heimat,” homing in on what you might expect to be its purest distillation: the Heimatroman, a pulpy literary genre dedicated to the travails of Germany’s rural ingénues and their stalwart gallants. But the Heimatroman’s idyll is not as inviolate as the cheap paperback covers might seem to suggest: it is forever threatened by intruders—foreigners, poachers—whose encroachments must be fended off. And so the strapping lad’s hand is quick to seize the rifle, or else the lass’s hand, once all obstacles to romantic bliss have been swept out of the way. Misunderstandings are a programmatic part of their world. A putative lover, for example, may well turn out to be a pony. Yet it is only on the rarest of occasions that you will catch two lads or two lasses on a cover.

As in his concurrently published artists’ book Where were you, Mr. Renner? or A lack of information, Volker Renner experiments with the interaction between image and text. In But Pedro’s a pony, the artist works with found material he extracted from Heimatromane in a painstaking labor of love. To point up how simpleminded the genre is and how absurd and out of touch with reality the portrait it paints of its locales, the artist confronts selected covers with snippets of dialogue from the respective novels. The synergy between the visual and textual narrative registers unleashes previously unimagined grandeurs of gesture and intensities of feeling and reveals their ludicrousness. A panorama of pastures and paranoia unfolds before the reader’s eyes (an image that is regrettably relevant in light of recent political developments that have yet to leave their mark on the Heimatroman).

A book chock full of human-interest stories from the idyllic countryside.Pictures of guns and pastures.Full disclosure: the publisher wanted a different ending.

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The first part of this title is taken from an irate review in an online forum: a reader was very unhappy with the series of photographs from my Wie war Las Vegas that ran in “Die Zeit.”The sequel or A lack of information folds Heiner Müller’s adage that ‘optimism is merely a lack of information’ into Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism.This new book is a panopticon of memories(pan “everything” / optikon “of sight”).Around the world in 80 phrases and pictures.

In Where were you, Mr. Renner? or A lack of information, Volker Renner returns to the scenes of his numerous travels over the past years and takes a trip down memory lane. The artist’s book is his attempt to reveal the instability and vagueness of recollection (and seeing) that we usually cover up in our need to attribute meaning to everything. Renner’s pictures embrace these uncertainties and even play with them—if you identify the motif on the book’s cover as a mountain massif, you’ve already fallen for the first illusion. His work strategically upsets our (visual) habits, deliberately training the eye on the edges of our attention, on what we otherwise perceive only unconsciously or overlook altogether.

For his most recent photobook, he went on a voyage into the depths of his personal photographic archive and compiled pictures he found along the trajectories of his recollections into a new possible narrative. “To remember is to lie,” Harald Welzer writes in his theory of memory, but photographs are generally assumed to show what was. The artist toys with the different expectations we bring to various narrative genres by combining the pictures with whimsical “intertitles”—self-penned poetic, absurd, boastful, or ruminative aphorisms that play along the photographs in perpetual repetition, challenging the viewer to construct a connection between image and text. By weaving in a second narrative format, the artist emphasizes that photography, too, is only one strategy of storytelling among others, though one we like to believe we are good at figuring out. That is an illusion, as you will experience paging through this book.

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The project “Sleep Tight” represents a very different kind of search for clues that challenges the viewer to do his own detective work. Everyone knows Columbo, the slightly quirky American police officer embodied by Peter Falk, who has maintained a steady late-night presence on German television screens since the 1970s. And we have all nodded off as the investigation dragged on and ended up missing the bad guy’s mistake that tripped him up. Volker Renner has certainly been there, and so he compiled this series: the crucial clues that helped Columbo identify the murderer from every single episode. The result not only relieves us of the obligation to stay awake to the end, as the title suggests. It also reflects an image of America subliminally broadcast, then as now, by cultural products such as television shows. Most importantly, Volker Renner’s series provides a key to his own work in photography and to photography in general: it can pick up leads, but the interpretation remains the task of the viewer—if he knows how to read the pictures and sticks to it until the case is solved.

http://josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_sleep_tight

If it weren’t just a formula with which people greet each other who haven’t met in some time, we might take the title long time no sea at its word: crossing the United States by car, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, you really won’t see the sea for a long time. So the pictures show motifs from inland America instead, areas obscurely referred to as the “Bible” or “Rust belt” by the media and associated with unbridled conservatism and the ravaged infrastructure of yesteryear’s Fordism.

Volker Renner’s 220-page book presents a collection of interior and exterior shots whose shared feature is his interest in the striking close-up. See, for example, the bible on the housekeeping cart at a hotel, its edge adorned with the words “PRAISE ‘BOB’ ATHEISTS MAKE BETTER LOVERS” (which is presumably why it’s being removed from circulation). The book’s pages teem with repairs of questionable workmanship, frost-damaged floors, water spots and burn marks, tufts of grass caught in car doors—in short, it is not least importantly a meditation on design: how in the world will hotel bedspreads ever be made to harmonize with the matching wall-to-wall carpet, or conversely, how is one supposed to bear the aesthetic insult of such combinations?

long time no see speaks to a special cognitive ability of the brain: the fact that we haven’t even noticed the water spots on the ceiling of our own apartment in five years. And so we might exclaim “long time no see!” in amazement when we absent-mindedly gape at the ceiling and suddenly rediscover the spots caused by our upstairs neighbor’s spills, or find ourselves staring at the deep grooves in the TV set’s plastic housing that we cannot explain, or spot the scratches in the laminate flooring we made when we moved the wardrobe months ago. Eye-insulting combinations, too, are everywhere, but we don’t see them, the brain goes easy on us, it spares us the stress that would come with facing these vaguely dissolute, but also anarchically poetic, scenes that nothing short of a deep cleaning and renovation could remedy. We don’t need to travel to America: we are surrounded by such motifs, only we’re more apt to see them in Volker Renner’s photographs than in our own homes.

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Bright frames before blue backgrounds. Rectilinear or, less frequently, curved. The view of the sky is unobstructed or crisscrossed by transverse struts; occasionally clouds gather. One, two, or three pillars provide support.

The seemingly endless repetition—Volker Renner presents altogether around seventy photographs of Floating Frames (2012)—highlights how these structures combine utter simplicity with infinite variation. The artist presents objects at the precarious instant between function and obsolescence. Like some works of minimal art, they bridge the antagonisms between “beginning and ending,” between “abundance and emptiness.” But the pictures are not photographs of Donald Judd’s and Dan Flavin’s works, their steel frames and neon tubes assembled for a collaborative piece. Renner found these lofty constructivist architectures towering above America’s roads: frameworks on which illuminated signs were once mounted that advertised businesses, broadcasting their radiant messages into the night to guide and allure motorists to places that no longer exist: as the venues folded, the signs disappeared as well. The ‘semaphores,’ however, remain, stripped of their semantic attire, pointing to their nature as pure signs; they are non-signs and signs of nothingness at once.

The Framing Floatings are a counterpart that complements Renner’s project A Road Trip Redone (2012), for which he revisited places, buildings, and peoples featured in Stephen Shore’s A Road Trip Journal (1973) and took their pictures. That book took note of what had vanished by leaving blanks where no photograph was available. Renner’s Floating Framings give the void its own photographic place.

http://josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_schwebende_rahmung

This book—the title means The Others—presents eighty-seven found photographs, or more precisely speaking, slides. And yes, Volker Renner, who unearthed them, studied with Peter Piller, who works with found materials as well. The pictures are snapshots of a Germany so stuffy and cozy it makes you gag. The German shepherd is barking, the child is turning a cartwheel, the Christmas tree silently stands to attention. Yet the images Renner has picked for the book from the original trove of two thousand photographs highlight how the attempt to capture family life and domestic bliss on camera can go seriously awry or at least take strange turns. Weird selections of detail and oddities like the taxidermied hawk that seems to be lunging at the Easter bouquet invite us to examine the private idiocy that lets us perceive strange arrangements as perfectly normal and even idyllic.

http://josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_die_anderen

Large golden graphical letters embossed into a hardback jacket made of gray book linen advertise the Grand Prize.

“Hang on a second …,” many readers, at least in Germany, will think to themselves: “Wasn’t that some kind of quiz show in the 70s and 80s?”

And indeed, there was a quiz show called “Der Große Preis,” and it was actually quite popular. Moderated by Wim Thoelke, it ran from 1974 until 1992: every month, self-educated experts faced the host’s questions in their chosen specialty. Before the advent of the Internet and Wikipedia, the show, which had record ratings of up to 60%, offered total nerds an opportunity to shine and garner enthusiastic applause.

So the book’s title transports us back to our childhood, and we are tempted to think that its pages will plunge us into a faded pastel-colored world of jovially patriarchal talk-show hosts, blow-dried hairdos, horn-rimmed glasses, mullets, shoulder pads, and walrus moustaches.

But we’re in for a surprise. As in many of his previous photography projects, Volker Renner challenges us to cast our expectations of the familiar aside.

Instead of the quiz-show shots we might have anticipated, we see hands stretching into the pictures before sometimes colorful, sometimes somber backdrops. Many seem delicate, fragile, gentle, timid, uptight, restrained; others are sturdy, coarse, defiant, strong-willed, blustering, undeniably there. The pictures included in the book are animated by the interplay of light, color, posture, and pictorial composition. The hands seem to convey rhythm and movement, emotion and song. They clamor for our attention and tell us stories of love, pain, joy, grief, and other strong feelings.

So Der Große Preis, in this instance, clearly doesn’t refer to the abovementioned quiz show: the event at the heart of the book is of a different kind.

Volker Renner snapped these pictures during the 56th Eurovision Song Contest, which took place in Düsseldorf in May 2011. Instead of framing grand moments from the show, his photographs direct our attention to small gestures on the periphery of the event, throwing a spotlight on an ostensibly negligible detail. What is essential—the protagonists to whom these hands belong—is edited out, literally cut off, and we catch ourselves trying to complement what we see, to complete the picture.

And that is where Renner’s choice of title suddenly seems to make perfect sense: this is a picture puzzle, and we’ve already begun to try and undo the fragmentation of these pictures by placing them back in the larger context in which they originated. Consciously and unconsciously, we associate the photographs with sounds, melodies, choreographies, motion sequences, stage acrobatics, costumes, characters, and performers. And so we, too, turn into nerds: ideal candidates for Der Große Preis.

http://josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_der_grosse_preis

A crack in a wall marked with black masking tape, four slices of restructured ham rolled up and laid side by side on a piece of paper towel, several knit sweaters, each emblazoned with a green dot, stacked atop each other, a concrete-slab floor with traces of tire wear: these are only some of the motifs included in the book Die Fuge, whose title may be read as “the gap” or “the fugue.”

At first blush one might think that the title refers solely to the depiction of physical gaps of varied composition, without any relation to the musical signification of the term: interstices between objects, joints where different materials abut, cracks, crevices, expansion joints, masonry seams, shadow gaps, false joints. Views of details we would otherwise probably overlook.

But the book’s title also alludes to the creative process. All pictures were taken during production for the film project L’art de la fugue (French for The Art of Fugue) in Paris. Volker Renner, who was the set photographer, escaped (fugere, in Latin, is to flee) the endless empty time between takes for the film by setting out on a chase (fugare, in Latin, is to hunt) for his own motifs, taking photographs in the intervals between the sequences to be shot. The coupé became Renner’s action. He left the space of the film to make pictures off the set that conformed to no specification.

This evasion of the work he was hired to do, and of the loss of creative self-control it entailed, translated into a new series of pictures set in the scene changes. In a sense, he framed an image of the stoppage of film, of its hiatus.

And so the pictures included in the book should be read not only as depictions of physical fissures, but also as illustrations of gaps in time. Taken together, they limn a strange portrait of Paris from which the characteristic sights of the metropolis are absent. Narrowly framed close-ups of door handles, button tapes, predetermined breaking points, and tears seem to present glimpses of what is going on behind the city’s scenes.

http://josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_die_fuge

The book project “a road trip redone” is based on Stephen Shore’s legendary “a road trip journal,” which served as the matrix for the route, motifs, and layouts. Shore’s book opens with a diary-like assemblage and concludes with a photography section. “a road trip redone” begins with the route; the photo section starts on page 201. It is the attempt to rediscover each view Shore saw on his road trip and capture it on film. A fundamentally documentary reenactment/remake, a pilgrimage in search of familiar images. As the tourist travels from sight to sight, Renner retraces Shore’s route and his movements in the places he visited.

Where Renner was unable to track down a motif, the corresponding space in the catalogue is left blank.

http://josefchladek.com/book/volker_renner_-_a_road_trip_redone

WIE WAR LAS VEGAS (WHAT WAS LAS VEGAS LIKE) is not the portrait of a city. Volker Renner doesn’t waste a single picture on the familiar motifs, and even avoids showing the skyline. The famous Circus Circus Hotel makes an appearance, but only as a reddish reflection of light; it is so glaringly lit up that its image looms even on the pavement, reminiscent of a faded bloodstain. The artist trains his lens on these marginal phenomena, on vestiges and cracks in the façade of the desert city that reveal its artificiality and constructed quality. In his second artist’s book, WIE WAR LAS VEGAS, Volker Renner, who studied with Peter Piller at University of Fine Arts of Hamburg and then continued his training as Piller’s master student at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, pursues his ongoing project of a photographic compilation of reality organized in pairs, arrays, and series. It takes a close and careful look to discern the categories that underlie his photographs; the highly subtle links between the individual pictures imply a nod to the iconic masters who surveyed Las Vegas in photographs: Venturi and Scott Brown, Ed Ruscha. Renner’s rigorously documentary approach and the absurdity of his subject notwithstanding, his photographs exude a delicate poetic quality and pastel-colored melancholy and coalesce into a haunting study.

Volker Renner’s images play with our expectations of what a photograph does. The center of his pictures is often veiled or blank, the angles are unusual, a grand hotel’s back door is more interesting to him than its luxurious façade. As the objects have shifted to the margins of the pictures, so, it seems, has their true subject—but what is that subject? What are his photographs about? Renner works in pairs, arrays, series. His photographic collection assembles surface phenomena and architectonic constellations that attest to the faith that social community can be designed and yet stand as evidence of the disintegration of the public sphere. The categories that guide the artist’s survey of German urban settings and peripheries are diverse, their manifestations overlap. Some pictures trace chronological series, based on a before-and-after effect that emerges when the artist revisits scenes he has captured in earlier photographs. Spatial and sculptural structures are one area of interest: see, for example, the clusters of benches that mark different kinds of squares. They reflect variations in building codes and the regimentation of human behavior by structures that present a ruinous aspect even when they are first installed. In another instance, a yellow hose leads from one picture to the next. Yet other pictures defy the shared pattern at the moment we think we have unriddled them. What the individual photographs have in common is not readily apparent: it is as elusive as the moments the artist singles out, and undefined like the places where it manifests itself.

Volker Renner’s photographs blur different states of affairs—before and after, unfinished and abandoned, occupied and deserted—in a simultaneity that lends them an almost timeless and universal quality. They offer intimations of the human condition, and yet he is not trying to catalogue the phenomena in question or draw up typologies. In fact, his work humorously calls photography’s very ability to record what is there in question, pointing out that “reality is fundamentally unclassifiable,” as Susan Sontag writes in Objects of Melancholy. Photography, Sontag argues, is the attempt to “sum reality up in an array of casual fragments” in order to get a handle on it. This drive to collect and sort casual fragments of reality is what propels Renner’s photography. By placing them side by side, he uncovers the systems of order that define the environments in which we live and reveals the visual habits that inform our attempt to make sense of reality and imbue it with meaning.