With Blitz und Enzianblau/Lightning Flash & Gentian Blue, Manfred Willmann presents his third profound artist book – following Schwarz and Gold (Graz 1981) and Das Land (Salzburg 2000), composed of works from the year 2005. Intense close-up views, series of landscapes, animals, plants, everyday objects and portraits are interrupted by reproductions of the backside of the Agfa photo paper Sensatis.
Having produced more than a thousand analog prints in the year 2005 on this material, Willmann has only looked at them ten years later and subsequently developed the present book. Blitz und Enzianblau brings together photographs that show not only the surface of the world, but also tell about of the medium of photography itself – of its very own possibilities to represent the world, in its beauty, ugliness and transience, as images. In the way as concrete poetry speaks about language itself, Willmann exposes the texture of the medium of photography. His photographs deal with constellations, still-lives, and moments – isolated by his flash, often painful in their existential depth, but entirely free of sentimentality.

Manfred Willmann, *1952 in Graz, Austria. Lives and works in Graz and Pongratzen.