Linda Fregni Nagler

Reconsidering Photography: The Staging of the Gaze

Linda Fregni Nagler has selected photographs from the MK&G collection that suggest intriguing associations with her own group of works entitled “How to Look at a Camera”. The resulting juxtapositions highlight two central aspects of the medium of photography: looking and being looked at and visibility and invisibility. The artist works with found photographs, acquiring the originals on the internet and then manipulating them. In this way, Fregni Nagler liberates the images from their original context of meaning in order to use them to inquire into the nature of photography. She seeks out the by the poetic and disturbing power of the photographic image, tracing motifs on the theme of “looking at” through the ages and the works of disparate image producers. By isolating pictures and refusing to provide a historical context or to place them together with other works by the same photographer, Fregni Nagler forces us to take a closer look. Questions arise which are obviously not from our own time, for example about the origin of the motifs. What purpose were these pictures made for and whom do they show? With her close examination, the artist breathes new life into portraits and object photographs from the MK&G collection. Lifted from their former context, the images seem even more unsettling, grotesque or lyrical.

The exhibition is part of the series “Reconsidering Photography”, which invites artists and scholars to engage with the MK&G’s historical holdings.