DIRK SEIDEN SCHWAN

Spanning the breadth of still life, portraiture, documentary, and conceptualism, Seiden Schwan’s photography is like a waterfall of time, momentarily stilled. German by birth, and now Paris-based, Seiden Schwan shares much of the Romanticism of his forebears.  Much of theirs, of course, painterly – Caspar David Friedrich, Albert Bierstadt, Gerhard Richter – but also graphically, in his intersections with artists like Käthe Kollwitz. In the former, we see extensions of our understandings of time within space. The fragmentary. The momentary, The temporal. This is what emerges so insistently, and so immediately, in works which explore aerial landscapes, the ocean, flares of the sun, and our sense of impermanence. As with Richter, Seiden Schwan understands the implicit power of thwarting our perception, of the blurred face, the unfocused portrait, the moments where we persist with our sense of comprehension. It is as if we must precisely in the moment that he reveals we can’t.

It is the latter, that great history of representation, teetering on the edge of documentary, where we find Seiden Schwan’s indebtedness and extension of portraiture. Somehow, he captures Kollwitz’s continual subject – resignation – then transfers and transforms it onto his subjects. Then, in frozen moments of expression, we encounter Seiden Schwan’s attempts to delve into our understandings of self, meaning, being, the heart. This, too, of course, extends history. Seiden Schwan draws on both individuals, and their environments, to critique what we might imagine as Goethe’s limitless potential.

This sense of ambivalence, of duality, of the interstitial, truly grounds his images. Those moments, as he explains, where we experience the “in-between of reality and the cosmos.” That’s truly his foundational oscillation, his dedication to exploring the great duality of our modern world. How is something itself and another, or, rather, an-other. How is that thing both hidden and revealed, seen and unseen, focused and blurred. The last being Seiden Schwan’s enigmatic contribution to our understandings of photography – his images in which exposure, or motion, present these same challenges. How is one to comprehend meaning when it is always already partially obscured?

In many ways, Seiden Schwan should be celebrated for his commitment to this question. His tool, the camera, seen all too often as a reliable source of truth. Its production, the image, blurring the lines between truth and speculation, captured and escaped. In part – in images such as sunsets breaking through clouds, reflecting on water – Seiden Schwan challenges us to identify with the fleeting nature of both seeing and being, and to acknowledge that it is in the blurring of everyday that we are the most likely to find focus. Focus less on the metaphor, leave the literalism of Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog aside, for example, and step into those moments in and for which the distortion, the obfuscation is less literal.

The blurred is one place where Seiden Schwan truly shines, in part because he challenges, even demands, that we strive to complete his images. A hand, rising from a bed in the morning sun. Palettes stacked in the sand. A head, absent from the room, its contents – books, clocks, shelves – clearly there. Fleeting moments, evidence of potential expended, and that yet met. It is not so much that there might not be another, similar, moment, but rather that he has captured, retained, and revealed this one. In an era in which images seem so prevalent as to be almost superfluous, Seiden Schwan invites us to pause, to see this singular moment, never to be had again. That’s the great beauty of photography, and of his persistent commitment to the moment. Capture that, and you may well be able to return to it, if not rely on it. Its existence may be gone, but its truth remains: it is, only, just a second. Please. What it means, what it shares, and what it reveals will take far, far longer to explain.