Kaluza lives and works as a photo artist, painter and author in Düsseldorf since his studies at the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. His work has been exhibited in various galleries and museums in Seoul, Shanghai, Jerusalem, Los Angeles and Berlin, among others, since 1995. Plays written by Kaluza have been performed in Düsseldorf, Berlin and Stuttgart. In the context
of his photographic work, the Rhine project is Kaluza's most colossal to date.
The basic idea of his photographic projects is that the concept of the artistic image can only unfold its persuasive power when the photograph captures a complexity that cannot be perceived with the naked eye. In a similar way to how a building in architecture only creates the impression of grandeur and representativeness desired by the builder from a certain dimension.
This is where Kaluza's Rhine project comes into play.
Together with his team, he walked the entire length of the Rhine from its source in Piz Badus (Switzerland) to its mouth in Rotterdam in eight months. A picture of the left bank of the Rhine was taken every 70-90 metres, the distance always corresponding to the perceptual space that can be perceived by the human eye. Kaluza realises a pictorial compression of the Rhine as a geographical phenomenon and creates an experiential space for the viewer that is detached from geographical reality, physically and visually. By compressing the 21,449 individual images into one, he succeeds in making the subject of his photos visible and tangible in a new way. If all the photos were displayed in a single line, a 15-centimetre-high photo bar would require walking a distance of four kilometres, about 48 minutes at a normal walking pace. Since it takes several days at a normal flow rate for the water to travel the entire length of the Rhine, the photographic reduction is also a compression of time and makes it possible to experience the
(river) reality as a whole.
Kaluza has created something new with his project. No one before him had ever documented the entire Rhine in seamless photographs. Such a project would have been unthinkable before the development of digital photography, because only digital photography allows a seamless presentation of the recordings in a single strip of images. A few years ago, the amount of data
was simply unmanageable. A total of 13 hard disks filled the recordings. Kaluza's team had to regularly collect the portable hard disks to transfer the content to the hard disks in his studio. It took his assistants a year just to process the images.
In the end, the result was more a kind of scenography than a classic panoramic picture. Kaluza consciously wanted to avoid the perspective of the commander's hill and the "overview" in the direct sense of the word and rather adopt an earthly perspective through a ground-level viewpoint. The photographer's movement on foot was also important for the special character
of the picture's aesthetics. It is precisely the slowness that enables the intensity of perception reflected in the Rhine project and allows the viewer to focus on details such as the quay walls, bridge heads and bushes. Almost incidentally, the project also records the changes in vegetation throughout the seasons. Cloudy and rainy weather and autumn sunshine, industrial plants and idyllic landscapes are given equal priority. With the help of digital technology, Kaluza creates for photography what was previously reserved for painting: the perspective of the big picture.
Matthias Fechter
Henry David Thoreau and Stephan Kaluza:
Hiking and inventory
In the middle of the 19th century, an American sets out on the road. He is Henry David Thoreau. His way of life of constantly going cross-country would become a central theme of his writings.
One of his most famous essays on walking is entitled "Walking". It is a meditation on mobility in an ever-changing world. For Thoreau, this being in motion is always a physical and mental movement. Every walk is a train of thought. It is to move away from all that is familiar and all that one already knows into a space that is as unprejudiced as possible. It is getting to know oneself
through the encounter: one does not claim the new space, but tries to follow what one finds there. This presupposes that I am really involved in this adventure: I have to be there with my thoughts, where my steps lead me. If I leave but stay mentally in the previous place, then my mind and body go crazy: "On my evening walk I would like to forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But sometimes it happens that I cannot easily detach myself from the village. The thought of some work comes into my head, and I am not where my body is, I am outside myself. On my walks I would like to come to myself. What do I have to do in the forest if I am thinking of something outside the forest? Walking means "coming to myself". Being in movement only makes sense if the thoughts accompany the senses and respond to them.
But Thoreau already saw that this cross-country way of walking is constantly under threat. Wandering through the wilderness of the as-yet-undetermined becomes increasingly difficult as humans begin to divide the land among themselves. The fences that stand in the way of the wanderer become more and more numerous: “But possibly the day will come when [the landscape] will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive Pleasure only, - when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth
shall be constructed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's ground” (W 2038). Thoreau dreads the day when we will only be allowed to be on and with the public roads. Then, he suspects, we will only be able to trot where others have already marked the route before us. As demarcations and boundaries, fences function as definitions: they map and define the landscape; they create a system of coordinates. For Thoreau they represent the thinking categories of tradition. But once these traditions have become widely solidified, freethinkers are discredited only as vagabonds who cross borders illegally. Anyone who strays disturbs the security of those who have settled on their property.
Thoreau thus connects the cross-country adventure with the movement of the American West. For him it is a departure towards what has not yet been marked. Any movement eastward - for Thoreau the appropriation of our history - must be complemented by a movement westward: “We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure” (W 2039). In particular, Thoreau compares this exploration of insecure terrain to walking through the swamps of American forests. One who walks through a swamp walks on swaying ground. The ground itself is moving, fermenting, extremely fertile and also demands the walker's one hundred percent attention. People should only build on this unstable and therefore sacred foundation for Thoreau: “I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. The wild wood covers the virgin mould,; and the same soil is good for men and for trees. (...) A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below, - such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages” (W 2044). A swamp is a transition zone:
everything that lives there thrives so wonderfully because it grows from what was there before. Only when the old decays can it become the humus on which the new grows. For Thoreau, this processuality is an inescapable reality. It applies to all that is. That is why the one who ventures into uncertain terrain is the one who is most in harmony with himself, because he is about to leave himself behind on the new paths.
Thoreau was a radical individualist: one who set out, in the spirit of Romanticism, to reach the twentieth century as early as the mid-nineteenth century. It was clear to him that there could be no arrival: an intuition that would only assert itself in the Modern Age. He already described reality as a process and as something fundamentally unfinished, always requiring new and only provisional cartographies. Cartographies that only indicate current probabilities of whereabouts. 150 years after Thoreau, another one is on the move. He is Stephan Kaluza. He lives in a time when the American western movement is just a myth sold to you from the big screen.
Most of Europe's swamps or bogs have been drained. A fully networked infrastructure is ordered by a forest of signs that tell you the shortest route and count the kilometres to your destination with reassuring continuity. The travel brochures have long since told you what to expect there. The hotel is booked. The international insurance has been taken out. The digital navigator guides you along the indicated routes. Those who don't want to take care of themselves - and many don't - can have their travel and leisure activities professionally managed by tour companies. A successful holiday is a holiday that goes as promised. The land is divided. The fences are up.
In this post-romantic and, at least, post-postmodern age, Kaluza walks along the Rhine, from its source to its mouth. He walks an exploratory path in the opposite direction. Rivers used to be used to advance inland from their mouths. But the river that Kaluza accompanies on its way is anything but untouched. It is rather a central and historical element of a cultural and industrial landscape. Straightened, fortified and provided with navigable canals, the Rhine is also a constantly used traffic artery. It has been bridged thousands of times as a trade route, an obstacle, a border and a community, and is part of countless treaties and agreements. At the same time, fairy tales and legends are reflected in its dazzling surface. Even today, the legendary Loreley waits for inexperienced youths to plunge unhappily from a rock into the water.
Accordingly, Kaluza does not have to cross swamps and thickets. He migrates mainly along dams, country roads and footpaths. He deliberately uses existing infrastructure. If an industrial plant gets in his way, he marches along its outer wall until he can see the river again. The picture shows only this wall, behind which, somewhere, the Rhine flows between docks and loading
ramps. Kaluza's hike thus serves to take stock; we witness an inventory presented as a panorama. What do we see when we walk along the Rhine in the 21st century? The river is photographed as an infrastructure that has always been taken possession of thousands of times and that enables processes of economic, political, poetic or other types of exchange in constant movement. A mesmerising space where signs of all kinds wander unhurriedly. All this is documented by Kaluza as he himself moves around.
In his own being on the move, he follows what he finds. In this sense, like Thoreau, Kaluza is willing to be surprised. But unlike Thoreau, Kaluza does not push it into a disordered space. On the contrary, he participates in a processuality that has already organised itself. He respects existing boundaries and walks within them without violating them. But in doing so with attentive persistence, he allows us to explore a complex phenomenon that without him we would never have been able to contemplate in this way. In this sense, he does not show us the new beyond (Thoreau), but within the established structures.
Kaluza confronts us with a snapshot that obviously extends in space and time. The Rhine unfolds like a scroll before the viewer, who realises that this picture has its own history to follow. Let us call such a composition panoramic processuality.
Kaluza himself emphasises that it is only by compressing the montage of images that the full extent of the Rhine becomes visible.
But in contrast to traditional panoramas, Kaluza's "panoramic view" is still 5,000 metres. According to his own statement, the logic between the result of the image and the production of the image is especially important to him: the visible corresponds 1:1 to the (physical) human ability to grasp it. And this visibility forces us - at least for a distance of 5000 metres - to follow the path along the flow of the image. Kaluza thus forces us to set out on the path. Because the viewer can only grasp his or her provisional snapshot by changing his or her point of view. Unlike the traditional panorama, we can no longer control the landscape at a glance. In this sense, the work underlines that we must keep moving on principle, as there is no final perspective.
Thoreau had something different in mind than Kaluza. Thoreau's Western movement is the expression of a radical individuality that wants to leave behind the infrastructure of tradition altogether. It is questionable whether such avenues are still available to us in the early 21st century. Perhaps they never were. But Kaluza shows us that we need not lose the adventure of the new, the break with all that is familiar, even if we cannot go beyond certain boundaries.
Thoreau and Kaluza: they were both different. But if they could have crossed paths, I am sure they would have hit it off.
Georg Schiller
1 Henry David Thoreau, „Walking“, in: Paul Lauter et al., Hrsg., The Heath Anthology of American
Literature, Vol. I (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1990) 2035.
See the full series (https://stephan-kaluza.de/fotoprojekt/das-rheinprojekt.html)
