Setting out from landscape and architectural photography, Solveigh Kaehler gradually widens her scope: portraits of children, masks, dolls, sculptures, still lifes all similarly draw her attention - and more and more she finds herself involved in subtle hunts for the elusive residual light. In just a few years an amazing and amazingly substantial oeuvre evolved, which is now for the first time documented by a representative selection.
Solveigh Kaehler loves black-and-white photography, but does not tend to black-and-white thinking. Even the darkest black in her photos contains light and the brightest patch is imbued with the dark.
Already in her earliest photography, this diffusion gives rise to a continuum of light and shade, an atmospheric aura, which like a transparent skin, like a flou (Solveigh Kaehler), a haze, veils the world of matter; permeating the pores of all surfaces, but at the same time seemingly fed by an inner luminosity. A soft momentum of movement cancelling the static and material rigidity of the visible world, without eliminating it This state of suspension allows us to experience the visible world in a state of trance.
In her photographs one is always struck by the feeling that she uses her camera to focus an X-ray beam onto the core of whatever it is, honing in on the location's substance, exposing it.
Solveigh Kaehler's artistic way of thinking and acting: sighting the material in the visual chaos of the world, and with a deconstructivist sensitivity for its original context to take it back into a fitting state of existence; allowing for a glimpse of the archetype, while at the same time visualising the degree of its decay. Deconstruction, reconstruction, construction of something new, old.
Not from light and shade, but from shadelight and lightshade does she create her world of images.
(From the essay "Shadelight and Lightshade" by Heiner Georgsdorf)