CHRISTOPH KELLER Christoph Keller, Introduction | Page 66

S-BAHN, 2000
The artist’s sustained thinking about media and photography (perceived in its theoretical definition
as a practice that, along with the givens imposed by its technological apparatuses, also determines
the conditions of its production, distribution, and reception) exemplifies Keller’s play with the
complex associations of a medium. Combining elements of the photographic and cinematic, in
his early career Keller invented processes for recording time photographically: devising cameras
that transported the film during exposure, creating what the artist called Rundumbilder (all-around
pictures) that registered movement and by implication time. Working to overcome the limitations of
the medium—influenced by experimental and structuralist filmmakers such as Bruce Connor, Maya
Deren, or Stan Brakhage—the apparatus determined the parameters of the formal outcome.
The images seem to dissolve the photographer’s perspective into a temporal continuum, a
technologically assisted process that invokes psychological operations, namely the dissolution
of an unchanging self, and an awareness of its motion in time and space. The extensive series of
Rundumbilder photographs—almost constituting an archive itself—addressed contemporaneous
theoretical discussions, such as the indexicality of photography, the durational condition of cinema,
the experiential aspect of viewing art, and the dissolution of the authorial subject.
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