2007

About Marko Zink

Ingo Springenschmid

Marko Zink is part of an avant-garde group of photographers that wrests an end from the title “The End of Photography” (Kunstforum vol. 172, 2004) in its literal meaning in so far as he consistently makes this end the theme of his work. Marko Zink counters the camera-work of “staged photography” with a subjectively motivated, almost private materiality which, unlike staged freeze-frames, cannot be translated into the mechanisms of photorealism. Quite to the contrary, it wrings a poetic concreteness from the subject of the Nature Morte of Western art history as it seems only for a limited period of time to capture that which triggered the shutter release, meaning it also contains its undoing, its disembodiment. It is this becoming by doing that he counters the end of photography with; not, however, by documenting it but by splitting action into its components, as it were, by disassembling it into sentences, not using it for purposes of documentation, but towards the development of an alphabet. The fallout, what is sifted out and does not correspond to any order, is given a name and something in the fashion of a works catalog of things ensues. These individual particles are not left to their own devices. Rather, they become vehicles for the denomination of Marko Zink ad personam and remain segregated from subject matter. In my mind, an intellectual achievement that has the potential to confront the genre of photography with new challenges lies in the dialectics of subjective-objective, wherein the subjective becomes the objective und the objective is transformed into the subjective.

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