BY PETER WATERSCHOOT
«Dear Dana,
There’s no such thing as coincidence. During the period I was pondering on what precisely to write about this little jewel (your book ‘in still Air’) I was reading Jean-Philippe Toussaints ’Naked’. JPT, an author with a masterly eye for detail and atmosphere. Every word he writes directs your imagination into seeing the wind play with a curtain, into hearing an Italian disco song unpurposely filling the space of a library filled with philosophy books. The same goes for your pictures. Where JPT takes us from language to image, you take us from image to language. The pictures are waiting ‘in still air’ to be read. I will always like the ‘manner of speaking’ that a photograph can be ‘read’. Consequently it allows itself to be articulated. It achieves being worthwhile being talked about. Thus written about; e.g.'On the delicacy of the photographs of Dana Stölzgen in the book 'in still Air'. A meandering book, stumbling through association, houses, furniture, portrait, unarticulated language, emotional landscape, personal psychology. Achieving in each one of them, the book itself is light, with lots of white breathing space, a tactile cover and perfectly contained editing.
© Dana Stölzgen from the series ‘in still air’
It is an extremely quiet book. A book of withheld qualities. A book with a strong backbone. Precise portraits. Subjects, as well as objects, stay with you, they linger, they join you after closing the book. As an author, you couldn’t be more in control. Your eye sits in the powerhouse of the soul. The ropes are held tight, but it doesn’t keep emotion from running deep. Let me take one example, the cover photo. An iconic photograph. A photograph which makes you think, ‘this is what a photography should look like’. ( That’s bad comment in fact, in this era, well, it’s certainly not postmodern). But you get away with this, elegantly. Renewing without renewing. Your photography is classical, but contains a remarkable uplifting humanity. The images stick to our mind. Well chosen subjects. Simple but correct. A girl in a white dress, with red hair and fair skin. The hair, tucked in.You have more than likely given the model the ‘tucking in instruction’. But sublime. Profound. Effectful. It is punctum all over. The disturbing, or mesmerizing punctum lies at the centerpoint, the heart of the images. Still images in which nothing much is going on untill our eye arrives at their very center, a place where you get shaken with a subtle shiver. A feeling I didn’t realise I had been missing in photograpghy for quite some time. (Maybe due to my aberrant taste in photography). Admit, it takes guts to dive into this quite classical approach on photography. You twist it a tiny bit further, just far enough to be precisely poignant, and not overdo it. Very civil. Very refined. Which, ( in a post post postmodern time) is in fact, a positive action, one way of reviving the medium, on a personal and artistic level, just by bringing it back to it’s core.
© Dana Stölzgen from the series ‘in still air’
© Dana Stölzgen from the series ‘in still air’
I can watch all of the ‘in still air’ images over and over again. Maybe because of the fact that they are ‘in still air’ (a feeling which, in these violent times, can be very comforting and soothing). As in soul food. Maybe you have created ‘a very comforting photography’. ‘in still Air’ is a photobook which has given me warm reading pleasure. I probably was craving for an aroma of romanticism after too much of other much darker stuff. But most importantly! This book is not only ‘light through curtain, breeze of spring’, there’s also something else going on. Namely; Austerity. There is an accurate preciseness in the perception of everyday things, that can’t be matched without being Dana. A great juxtaposition. Bring us more books.»