What is Natural?
The Simultaneous Effect of Frank van der Salm's Photographs
by Maxine Kopsa

Publication: Post-Nature, Biennale di Venezia 2001
Publisher: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL
Published in English

(...) new ‘non-places’. Despite his choice of cold, often disheartening subject matter he cannot be tagged a warrior of the watch-out-we’re-doing-badly-our-cities-are-cold-and-barren party line, instead one could say he depicts our new mutated city in all its detached glory. He depicts it and is a product of it. At the same time.

Next to an advertisement on compulsive disorder in the L.A. Weekly of August 13-19, 1999 there’s an article on Frank van der Salm’s photographic images. The ad assures: ‘There is an answer … obsessive-compulsive behavior can be treated.’ While at the same time the piece on Van der Salm defends: ‘…an apartment structure in which people knowingly or unknowingly act out consecutive realizations of little art-life dramas.
And I had to think: this apartment building he photographs, this landscape of urban emptiness he so often chooses, this is the location which breeds compulsive behavior, this is the place we have created and this is the place where we suffer from our own compulsions.’ I read on: ‘Obsessions (repetitive and intrusive thoughts such as washing, ordering, counting, checking) are symptoms, and may cause marked distress in your daily routine.’ Our daily routine is ordered by these locations; it is set into motion by the structures we have chosen to surround ourselves with.

The point here is not really society’s increasing hang-ups but rather the way my mind zapped between these two bits of printed material: I connected the contents of the ad with the subject matter of Van der Salm’s photographic images in a seemingly random manner, one parallel to the way in which our urban landscape is being built today and most importantly, one parallel to the manner in which Frank van der Salm photographs his landscapes.

Download Full Essay Kopsa.pdf