It's a strange feeling when a man living in the same time as you presents you with the archaeology of your time, your country, your history. I first saw Christoph Grill's work five years ago on a table during a portfolio review in Bratislava.
These were photographs taken in the countries of the former USSR. Many people photograph there. The post-Soviet reality is a Klondike fact for young photographers. However, this time it was different. Emptiness. Fragments. Losses. The reflex of a university education worked:
"What kind of archaeology is this?" - I asked, unaware that in front of me were the works of a professional archaeologist.
Grill is, as it were, hunting for traces of lost memory. He is not interested in restored facades, but in what lies behind them, where reality is covered with cracks and shatters if only touched. He is looking for what may be gone, but without which it is impossible to understand how things were. Because only fragments of the original old wall help convey what the wall looked like. Grill's photograph - a testimony to a long journey. He has traveled almost all of the former Soviet Union. He even used his author's exhibition in southern Russia as an opportunity to go to the seaside. He is interested in places of great emptiness: the sea, steppes, mountains. Places where the scale and temporariness of the human presence are felt in full: they are tiny compared to the length of the shores of the seas and rivers; the ruined cultural palaces and military bases of the 20th century are little better preserved ruins than ancient monuments.
On his way, Grill encountered dilapidated archives and deserted libraries, newspapers left behind in a hurry, and scraps of slogans - a visual reminder of an era that will gradually settle into oblivion, probably as quickly as the stones, wood and clay of the buildings.
Similar compositions, earth and ruins, animal skeletons and scraps of life from the past, can be found in American photography: Weston and Suskind, Sommer and Laughlin, the modernist period of visual culture of the last century. Now in Grill's work, a different country and a different time. So why, in the footsteps of Walker Evans, does he pay attention to the traces left and not cleaned up by man? Grill is not interested in decay and neglect. He is interested in silence. As the American photographer traveled around his country, he witnessed how life "before history" (perceived by white people as only perpetuating their civilization) was under the thin layer of capitalism's turbulent and brief development (some fifty years, 1870-1920) in boundless America. Grill in the post-Soviet space is mesmerized by the possibility of touching the threads of the times. Not so much a reconstruction of the concrete of a historical period, but a testimony to the continuity of human history, experiencing its infinity. The ruin before whose image we find ourselves sharpens our experience of the past - as loss and as continuity.
Grill is also interested in the life of the void and life in the void - in places of little interest to the casual viewer. How do people live there, in "nowhere"? On a par with panoramas - where the void occupies the more important central part of the composition, and details, fragments of the past, like peeling skin, meet towards the edges - portraits are important to Grill. For the most part, these are portraits in the landscape and in familiar surroundings, in homes, inside and on the edges of settlements. These "portraits in the surroundings" - ethnographic-psychological and deeper - are archaeological-psychological studies of the lives of the modern inhabitants of boundless spaces on the shards of a destroyed empire....
Christoph Grill, (born 1965 in Austria), studied biology and anthropology from 1991 to 2000. He lives and works in Graz as a photographer (freelance) and archaeologist. Since 1996 he has traveled to former socialist countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Since 1999, he started a long-term project about the former republics of the Soviet Union. In 2005, his first solo exhibition was held at Fotogalerija Stolp, Maribor, Slovenia
The article appeared in issue 30 of "Fotografia Quarterly" in 2009