Wolf Kahlen is a man whose story is more interesting than his photographs. From them we get no shock of impact as momentous as the one that sunk the boat Kahlen was on last summer. But we’ll get back to the sea saga in a minute. Kahlen’s photographs come in long, fold-out books, and are all done in series. One book/series, for instance, shows what three different cities look like when photographed once an hour from the same vantage point over the same 24-hour period. (During eight of those hours all the prints are of course pitch black, or would have been if one of the cities hadn’t been Reykjavik, where the sun never sets at the time of year that the pictures were made.) In another book, a photograph of a skull is followed by a photograph of the first photograph lying next to the same skull. This is then followed by a third photograph in which it is the second photograph that lies next to the skull. Und so weiter (and so forth) as they say in German, which is Kahlen’s native tongue. These books are very Germanic. After the first couple of pages of each book, we get the idea; we don’t need any of the 10 or 12 additional pictures Kahlen insists on supplying. These books are so methodical, so mechanical, they make you want to scream and tear out your hair, or better yet, tear out Kahlen’s hair.
The only thing that brought me up short was Kahlen’s reference to his work as “photo-entropy,” and his explanation (he happened to be present the day I went to see his show) that the work was about “the tendency of everything to fall into disorder.” He thinks the work demonstrates this tendency. I think it overcompensates for it. Kahlen also said, “What I actually want is something very schizophrenic.” That he’s achieved. The “key” exhibit in the show, by his own account, was the book which reproduced as a continuous strip a roll of film he had in his pocket at the time of his shipwreck off the Galapagos Islands. Here the randomness he seems to see in his other work really did occur. Because of the damage done by the salt water, some unexposed frames at the end of the roll contained a lot of shapeless blobs. “See, this one is North America—there’s Florida—and this is South America, and here’s Africa,” said Kahlen going from blob to blob. His explanation was very disarming. My rancor dissolved in befuddlement.
—Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr.
