Sandy VolzAfter Dark (Signed)

AFTER DARK: the programmatic title hints at the themes explored in this volume of photographs
by German-American artist Sandy Volz. The monograph, published by Revolver, affords a compre-
hensive insight into Volz’s photographic fascination with the ambiguous. She consistently focuses on the “becalmed accessories” of locations and events, although the spatial and narrative relation-
ships of what she portrays remain obscure. She does, however, make clear reference to the painterly traditions of the Renaissance, Mannerism, and the early Baroque. 

Volz’s photographic stagings open spaces of associative ambiguity, in her chiaroscuro images a continent of speechlessness can be made out—an insistent silence in darkness somewhere among tension, melancholy, and timelessness. Her settings and characters reject the cultural constructs of self-assurance supplied by the familiar or the unknown. The four series published in this volume (Hearts of Darkness, Innenleben, Me and the Others, and Stranger) explicitly avoid focusing on the understanding and knowledge that result from glimpsing interiors and interactions, but rather seek to approach the unknown via conjecture and supposition.

The plates are accompanied by a six-page essay by author and curator Michael Glasmeier, who suggests an art historical positioning: “The photographs do not prepare us for any sudden shift in insight; they remain as they are, as they were destined, to conceal things. This is their unusual, quiet, resistive quality in times of loud, noisy addiction to assertion and self-fulfillment.” (Excerpt)