Sigmar Polke Analysis

Polke was Born in 1941 he studied from 1961 to 1967 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy where he helped launch an art movement known as Capitalist Realism, which mined popular culture and advertising for its pictorial language.He first took up photography in the 1960s using a handheld 35mm Leica camera. The  camera with a silent shutter gave him the ability to record "found" still lives quickly.

Polke also began to experiment with printing techniques in the darkroom to transform the raw material of his negatives through the process of photochemistry.

In this print he has combined both overexposed and underexposed prints together as well as positive and negative printing to create as he called 'enigmatic narratives' whereby the viewer draws up his/hers own questions about the piece.The combination of the curtains a blacked out figure and a silhouette of a  hand creates mystery and suspense about what is actually happening in this shot.

At times Polke placed two negatives in the enlarger to introduce context and narrative into the final layered image. In this image, he used double exposure to embed shoppers carrying umbrellas  and a photography that looks like a shower to illustrate to the audience that the story of this was to show shoppers carrying umbrellas as they navigate a flooded street. My first reaction to this piece was that it looked complicating and confusing but when i actually analysed it a little more I began to pull out the meaning of it.

Polke also taught himself to develop his own negatives and enlarge prints. From the beginning, he viewed the darkroom as an arena for developing prints and experimentation and seeing images emerge led him to disregard standard procedures that determine the length of time a print is to remain in each chemical bath and the sequence of those baths. He made up his own "rules" of the darkroom which often resulted in scratched negatives, under- and overexposures, and prints that further obscured details to create visually disorienting compositions.

 This photograph is of two skeletons leaning against a wall. One has a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and the other stares out of the corner of his eye socket at him, although they are both deceased they look at each other as if they are sharing a joke. The yellowy paper suggests this photograph is very old what's interesting about this piece is that the skeleton on the left appears much lighter that the one on the right this can suggest many things for example because the skeleton on the left is holding a cigarette this could suggest this was the cause of his death which would explain why his bones look rotten, another reason could be simply that the skeleton on the left has only been decreased for a little while whilst the other has been gone a long time.The lighting in this looks like it could just be natural daylight as there is a miniature shadow over the left skeleton.The background space resembles stone, but the hunched shoulders of the figures suggests they are sitting down.I think this piece was a organised photo shoot as skeletons are normally buried underground so for this piece i think sigmar dressed up the skeletons this way deliberately to make it look like a candid shot. This piece ha inspired me to play around with surrealism when creating photo shoots and to go with something strange and unusual.