Jörg Sasse

Jörg Sasse was born in 1962 in Bad Salzuflen, Germany. He attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1982 to 1988, where he studied under Bernd Becher. His early work comprises images of display windows and their multifaceted reflections, and still lifes of mundane domestic interiors. Beginning in 1994, Sasse stopped taking his own photographs and began digitally manipulating found images—primarily land- and cityscapes taken by friends, acquaintances, and unknown others. He developed a process of scanning images into his computer, changing them, and then making film negatives of these manipulated images, from which the final prints are made. In 8144 (1998), the beachside lamps shine brightly even though night has not yet fallen. The carnival ride rising over the edge of a wall in 8246 (2000), originally still, seems to be in motion, its lights blurring into curved lines. Silhouetted figures await arriving passengers within the structured glass confines of an airport terminal in the triptych 6287 (2006). By naming his works with only four-digit numbers, Sasse underscores the fact that they are machine-made (he uses the numbers for keeping track of the images on his computer).

Sasse had his first solo show at the Kunstverein Region Heinsberg in 1989 and has since shown throughout Germany and Switzerland, as well as at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1997), Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York (1997, 1999, 2000, and 2001), Mai 36 in Zurich (1998, 2002, and 2004), and Musée de Grenoble (2005). In 2007, a major retrospective of Sasse’s work was mounted at the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf. His work has appeared in many group shows, including Kitsch-Art at Markthalle für Moderne Kunst in Stuttgart (1992), De Andere, De Andere, L’Autre at Het Nederlands Fotomuseum in Sittard, the Netherlands (1994), Sightings: New Photographic Art at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (1998), Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2001), Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2002 and 2003), andObjectivités at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2008). He has received grants from the Deutscher Künstlerbund (1996) and the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani in Venice (1997), and in 2003 he received a Kunst Köln-Award. He lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf.
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/3960/J%C3%B6rg%20Sasse

I have had discussions with my peers and tutors about my work, they wondered if it would be a good technique to scan in my images, then print them to acetate, to the make darkroom prints as if they were negatives. I didn't not reject this idea but I had many considerations to this practice. I was not concerned that they would not yield good results, in fact I am confident they would, however this isn't a practice that I have previously explored, and I don't think it would add a greater 'meaning' to my work. The work being a process formed of my relationship with the camera, doesn't need additional steps to make a final print. I have kept any digital manipulation to a minimum as the negatives are tiny prints, they are beautiful by themselves and have a distinct pure quality that would be lost in the realm of digital Photoshop. I feel making fake negatives to mask the process of shooting on darkroom paper destroys the simple concept of time moving. If I was to do darkroom prints I may as well have shot on film and used the tiny aperture to create a slightly lengthy exposure and argued that this worked. I feel the use of darkroom paper is necessary to shoot really long exposures that truly represent my time with the camera and my time without the camera.