To speak today of contemporary Luxemburgish photography is to enter the obsolete double game of the question of nationality and of belonging to a category of expression that is no longer really definable.

Nevertheless, our care to collect , to catalogue, to label makes us often retain classifications which no longer correspond to the nature of the artwork in question.

The artists themselves do not always avoid this. Many work precisely on the border between the plastic arts and photography and participate in both photographic exhibitions and events displaying purely plastic arts.

Where is contemporary Luxemburgish photography situated? Has it integrated the question of representation and an interrogation of the act of photography? Likewise, has it been subject to the influence of the different positions, which the photographic image occupies in the contemporary art world?

Let us recall briefly, that during the 80’s the opening of Luxemburgish galleries to new international influences was accompanied by a questioning of the pictorial support, no longer privileging pure painting, but leaving a little room for installation, video, and photography. In that context one must underline the regrettably short existence of Jochen Herling’s Gallery 52, which was entirely devoted to photography. With exhibitions like the one displaying works of Tom Drahos, the gallery certainly contributed , in its own way, to the development of a rhetoric of photography.

On the side of the creators, the group Zone 6 proposed, already in 1986, an alternative to the traditional conception of photography as testimony. The artists of this group opposed the idea of the objective document with a plastic understanding of the image. Their photographic works were dominated by a subjective gaze; their photographs were no longer mimetic representations but rather mnemotic ones, fabricated and even manipulated.

Parallel to this new approach, there developed a way of thinking about the plasticity of photography in and around Galerie Nei Liicht of Dudelange and in the heart of the Café Crème magazine. Likewise, thanks to meetings with renowned photographic artists during the courses organized by the National Audiovisual Center (Centre national de l’audiovisuel) and owing to the founding of a collection at the BCEE the young Luxemburgish photography has been able to quickly develop with unique photographic works, large formats and sometimes integrating into the creative process using many mediums.

Let us remember also the opening, a few years ago, of spaces devoting a part or all of its program to photography. Such as gallery Erna Hécey (Nan Goldin, Andres Serrano…) the espace 2 of the Clairefontaine gallery which is totally reserved for photography (D. Appelt, P. Raynaud…) and also Casino Luxembourg-Forum d’art contemporain, which has shown important photographic works in different exhibitions, particularly “The 90s: A Family of Man?” in 1997.

Amidst the pioneering Luxemburgish artists, who possess a multiple vision of photography, Luc Ewen and Jean Luc Koenig have moved on from the manipulation of the negative and positive to numerically altering images with special programs. These digital manipulations also opened the door to other artists who have abandoned picture making on behalf of the photographic image such as Carole Chaine, Michèle Reuland and Lucile Risch.

Amidst the others, the medium used analogically, became experimental material with which to seek limits of fiction and the symbolic. This was the case with Gast Bouschet, Yvan Klein, Michel Medinger, whereas the installations and projections of Vera Weisgerber, the photographic tableaux of Roger Wagner and the portraits of Christian Aschman or Christian Mosar put in place an iconography of the contemporary world.

Amidst the young artists, Véronique Kolber exploits - with great sensitivity - her personal and intimate everyday, in assembling the apparently banal and fragmented, but suggestive images into a kind of fictive journal. Thierry Frisch, another young photographer from the same school as Kolber, has chosen to infiltrate the home of the Irish family of his best friend - a sort of alter ego for him - to reveal with these photographs interior details a popular culture we feel our own. As in the series Chubs and Chasers, he succeeds in describing a certain poetic ambience.

With the same spirit, but in a much more reserved way, the photographs of Robert Hornung, inspired by Luxembourg, but realized with the intention of being echoes of lonely strolls in the early hours of the night, belong to a pictorial frame which is radically different from the photographs we know of the city. These often magnificently pale and out of focus images speak to us poetically of man and his city.

It is thus difficult to situate contemporary Luxemburgish photography. Few are those who really question the photographic act or integrate a social reference in their artistic project.

In Luxembourg, as everywhere, the different approaches coexist, ranging from documentary photography to digital manipulation, and being a sort of delayed reflection of international photographic practices.

It seems to me that many Luxemburgish photographers are inspired more by the tendencies that emerge in the recent international photographic scene than by representing a national identity.

Paul di Felice