Andreas Müller-Pohle: Visual Poetry and Un-Figuration

Abstract

This text discusses the abstract photography as poetical form and focuses on the work of German artist Andreas Müller-Pohle. Since the 1970s, Müller-Pohle explores different procedures which, although based on the principles of analogue photography, subvert in different levels the classical rules of the photographic process. Contrary to the programmatic nature of the photographic process requires, the artist explores it as creative resource, in which the mechanical action and rationality of the process give way to the unexpected, to daydream of shapes. Müller-Pohle use certain features of the photographic process beyond to its classical role of “bringing back”, similarly, an existing object in the world. The approach taken considers the abstract photography as visual poetry and discusses the work of Müller-Pohle as a conceptual way of addressing issues surrounding the figural.