BIOGRAPHIE

Klaus-Martin Gareis



The works of Klaus-Martin are categorized in three areas:

The analog works
Basis for the pictures is always a black & white photography, which has been taken using either traditional film cameras, plastic cameras or pinhole cameras.
In the traditional dark room the film negative gets processed, enlarged on Baryt paper and developed by using experimental photo chemistry. After mounting the gelatine silver print on aluminium, oil colour is used to finalise each work. For the Brom series an alternative technique called brom oil printing is used.
As the working processes are rather complex and not really predictable, the result is always a none reproducible unique piece of work.

The analog / digital works
The digital lightroom does have some advantages over the conventional darkroom. Camera film negatives that were believed lost, because hopeless over- or under exposed, do get a another chance to be worked on.
Basis for the pictures is again a black & white photography, which has been taken with analog film cameras. But in most cases even the most advanced
development chemistry was not able to produce a usable print in the darkroom.
With the help of the digital darkroom, these negatives have been scanned and then digitally processed in many different ways.
No effort has been made in trying to make those works look analogue.

The digital works
A digital picture is - as all digital information - a big crowd of zeros and ones which without electricity we can neither create nor look at them.  A lot of technical equipment is required to make digital pictures visible and the manipulation of such pictures is quite easy these days. Are such pictures still real or are they more like a digital surreality?
None of the works in this series look real - they are all strongly manipulated with all kind of photo manipulation software filters.