Exhibition Catalogue 'Technik und Methode' 2012
Fotogalerie Wien (pdf)
Jewels of the North
Ulrike Künnecke, Berlin, Germany 2008 (pdf)
Fantasies of Repetition
On Frauke Hänke's art and the echo of a text by Handke
Dr. Elke Ostländer, Villa Grisebach Gallery, Berlin, Germany 2004 (pdf)
Gum Bicromate Print
Frauke Hänke/Claus Kienle, Hamburg, Germany 1993 (pdf)
For us travelling means collecting materials. We understand exploring a foreign place with a camera as a very personal form of documentation.We see ourselves as observers: brief moments, small sections and fragments are recorded and later reassembled into new stories.
We are not interested here in the special and apparently exotic objects of unknown surroundings, we prefer to direct our gaze on everyday and incidental things. What kind of seating is there in Reykjavík or Istanbul? What effects does a shower of rain have on the way we see a place? When we travel we are often regarded with curiosity or mistrust - neither twenty shots of a landscape which, for the majority of travellers, is probably without interest and taken from a moving bus, nor photographing plastic chairs outside a hairdresser's shop really correspond to the common definition of travel photography. Who wants to be reminded of a pile of plastic bags at a front door?
We consider our picture series to be potential stories. Time and place undergo shifts, fragments are re-combined and have details - for example embroidered words or instructions - added. Repetitions in the series of images (which are never quite identical), mirroring and slight shifts in the perspective slow the gaze, cause it to move backwards and forwards and discover something new.
The use of gum bichromate prints creates unique pieces.The complex production process demands an intensive concern with the image as it is coming into being. The choice of surface supports the image - e.g. wood or fabric - and the monochrome colouring divest the photographs of their documentary character so that the images and objects do not appear "real" as is often expected from more conventional photography.