image by
Arnold Odermatt
Stansstadt
You could have seen here a sequence of images by Arnold Odermatt…but now you can´t anymore,
I was asked by BILDKUNST.DE
to delete the images by
(these were the names spelled out)
Loretta Lux,
Man Ray,
Valie Export,
August Sander
Lotte Reiniger
and every other artist represented by them or to pay a fee for publishing their images.
They represent around 126 000 artists from around the world.
I am working on this blog for my fun,
and for the enjoyment of people interested in photography and art.
There is no income generated whatsoever by this site for me.
Many of the images I use here are floating all over the net,
other images I scanned to upload them to my blog.
To share them, to enrich the world with the work of artists I do admire.
No, my blog is not important.
But it is part of what I would call our common wealth.
I don´t think that I am the source of income losses for the artist,
or anybody else.
Art as part of everyday life,
art easily accessible by everybody without barriers and fees,
art as part of the free flow of thoughts and
communication.
But not in the case of artist represented by Bild-Kunst.
Arnold Odermatt was a police officer. And Arnold Odermatt liked to photograph. When he started to document car accidents with his camera, this was a really strange matter to his colleagues. He instantly was reported to his chiefs. Subsequently he managed to convince them of this innovation, and went on photographing all kinds of accidents.
Arnold Odermatts images are not neutral documents of reality, even if they look so.
Odermatt was photographing catastrophes without letting them look like that. No death, no shock, no blood, no sorrow.
His images seem to be the products of a deadpan humor, but they never were meant to be humorous. What he is showing us are surreal sceneries produced by reality.
For forty years Arnold Odermatt was documenting car accidents.
After his retirement he was planning to produce a book with landscape photography. His son convinced him that the police photographs were the ones to publish.
