German photographer Lukas Roth lives with his wife,painter Divna Omaljev, and their four children in a blocky house designed by now defunct b&k+b,m architects in Cologne’s up-and-coming Ehrenfeld neighborhood. When I visited the family at home one evening last January, Omaljev was slicing fresh mushrooms in the lime-green custom kitchen designed by their friend Joep Van Lieshout, and the children were fully absorbed in making pencil drawings.
Roth took me on a little walkabout between the study and the studio, where several of his large-format photographs hang on the bare concrete walls. His pictures are made possible by the not-so-new technology of Photoshop, though it takes a keen eye to realize that they have been manipulated. After studying photography at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, France, he worked for a decade as an architectural photographer, but recently began making art photography based on the notion that the true atmosphere of a given place can best be captured by combining many images into one. In 2004, Roth won the prestigious Otto Steinert Award, and nowadays his photos are represented by Cologne’s Martin Kudlek Gallery.
In my studies I was interested in urban scenes where people look like tiny stage actors. There’d be one corner of a streetscape that was really interesting, but in another part something was happening that was going to destroy the whole image, like a big truck backing up. I sometimes worked with cutouts and things like that—I took lots of pictures of the same place at the same time of day and then pulled bits together in one composition. In a sense it was a condensation of time. But back then, there wasn’t a way to do it digitally, and I couldn’t get the right level of illusion.
When all this computer stuff, Photoshop and whatever, came into play, I immediately started using it. But there was a financial problem: In the ’90s it was still very pricey to get scans done. For instance, if I wanted to put a picture together out of 20 scans, I had to pay the lab over 2,000 euros. In the end I had to buy a good scanner for my commissioned work because everyone wanted scans. After I got the scanner in 2002, I really started to chomp into my own work.
I think my work was also informed by a deception I’d noticed [when] taking architectural pictures of certain places. There was a very strong atmosphere I’d feel in a place that the picture would miss. So I was trying to find a technique to get back that impression. Being able to capture any architectural environment can be difficult, because while we are there we are constantly in motion—looking around, crossing, walking. So we get many impressions that add up together in our memory. One picture might record a particular aspect of the scene, not the whole thing like we would remember it.
Often, after I notice that a photo of a place didn’t capture what I thought it should, I go back and make sketches with a digital camera. I take many pictures, and then on the computer I mount them together quickly to get an idea. Then I compare that image with my memory of the place, and think about what I should change. I figure out which parts of the image I forgot in the first go. For example, when I photographed the bathers from the Pont du Gard, I learned from the sketch phase that I needed more photos looking down on people from the bridge above, to montage with images looking straight ahead.
I try to make the montage look like it might be a real, unmanipulated picture. I want the spectator to trust the image—which exacerbates his irritation when he finds out it’s manipulated. If he knows the place or is extra-observant, he might realize that some element can’t be correct. It’s important to me that the photos make people think about the picture and their perception.
Because what matters to me is the feeling of the place, not where it is. And nowadays photos are often conglomerations of different places. Many people still believe photography is always authentic. Even though people know that in advertising, photos are usually manipulated, most still have a subconscious idea that they document something real. But my children, because they see how the pictures are done here, they are always questioning photos. It may be a process of change of generation. This feeling that a picture is a document from a specific place might fade with time.
