Foreword by Wim Wenders:
Erratic blocks
("I see something you don't see!" "Yes, now I see it too!")
In our throwaway society, finding things is not a high priority.
Something found can't be worth much...
In contrast, invention is highly valued and is quickly equated with creativity. After all, the "inventor" is the jack of all trades!
What remains for the "finder" but a measly finder's fee...
I could never come to terms with this overestimation.
I find (sic), especially in photography, the discovery of the given, the detection of unknown, but real existing things or of forgotten or overlooked places, marveling "at everything that exists", is a much richer and more enriching task than creating new realities, assembling "new realities" from digital elements that can easily and quickly be stolen from the world and alienated beyond recognition.
In today's digital photography, however, it is precisely this act of reinventing the world that is most highly regarded and en vogue.
"Digital image editing" is both a fast-growing industry and a new popular sport in front of the computer or on the cell phone, For which there are already a thousand apps to quickly conjure up the craziest image distortions from plain reality or to create new content.
I'm not comfortable with the idea that more and more new things are being brought into the world, so that more and more old things are disappearing or are being buttered up without ever having had a chance to be seen.
It's like this growth mania that is driving our economy, the financial world and politics.
Wolfgang Söder has impressively corrected this imbalance.
His found photographs, which he has found and collected at flea markets or God knows where in the world over decades, and which he then paints (yes, by hand) so that something shocking suddenly appears in these pictures, or something emerges that one could not have imagined in one's wildest dreams, they touch me deeply.
"It all existed once! All these faces, all these people, all these things, all these rooms, meadows and beaches, all these funny, terrible, tragic situations, they're not staged, they've just been "put out there".
By analog image processing.
What I like so much about it is the eye for the overlooked.
Every real photographer and every real painter founds his own school of seeing.
You can turn to whomever you like. As soon as you enter someone's pictorial universe, you recognize the laws in it, the rules, the fun, the quirks, the preferences, the idiosyncrasies and enter a unique world. iconography. So here is the master class for the overlooked.
When you leaf through the pictures, you will get stuck with every single one, because on the one hand you will recognize something long familiar in them, something so familiar that you would not have noticed it if you did not see it depicted right there in front of you, but at the same time, and this is the extraordinary thing about it, you will discover something completely new, as if humanity were an unknown species, as if this planet and its strange inhabitants could be seen as something completely new. just discovered, or as if someone had found a tribe that had never been in contact with civilization.
Unbelievable!
