Baltic Amber
Alexander Kadow
Direct analogue C-Prints of Baltic Amber show the inside of these 20 million year old relicts of a pre-human time. Baltic Amber is a mostly orange and hardened resin which often includes insects and plants from a long ago time. This indexical characteristic but also the orange color remind of the photographic negative. The Baltic Amber is being used as a negative in the analogue darkroom for these photographic prints and allows the natures’ physical memory to be translated by this human technique of time-preservation into an abstract vision.
Alexander Kadow lives and works in Hamburg, Germany, where he was born in 1985. The examination of the possibilities and limits of photography plays a decisive role in his work.
A combination of experimental analogue and digital photography, research-based, documentary elements and scientific imagery searches for the supposed truth content of photography and deals with the ecological effects of human action. Photography is used as an aesthetic object, medium and object of investigation.
After his apprenticeship at the Lette Verein Berlin until 2010 he studied from 2015 at Hochschule für bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg in the class of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and from 2017 in the master class of Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie. He received the Bachelor of Fine Arts in July 2017 and continues with the MFA at HfbK.
The newest work 'blast from the past' clashes two time scales: Amber is being examined as a time capsule and its possibilities to function as a photographic negative which shows snapshots of insects, frozen in its movement 20 million years ago. But the seabed of the Baltic Sea also keeps bombs and ammunition which were dumped after WWII in order to get rid of it, irrespective of the ecological disaster.