Gottfried Knapp

Albrecht Ade

Albrecht Ades 'photages', created with special light techniques, have nothing in common with the 'photocollages' or 'photomontages' of the 20th century. When artists as different as El Lissitzky, John Heartfield, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Raoul Hausmann or Hannah Hoch constructed futuristically bold, surreal or satirical images from photographic materials as a response to quotations from reality cut out and then stuck into Cubist 'papiers collés' by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, they worked mainly with someone else's material, with trouvailles. In contrast, Ade uses only his own material for his combination images, and his method for mounting images, for 'editing them into each other', does not need of scissors and paste either. He cultivates the usually involuntary effect of double exposure, a hazard from the days of analogue photography. He controls the chances of pictorial superimposition and confusion, artfully and purposefully arranging his own, deliberately positioned images among and on top of each other, using a technically elaborate matching and omission process.

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