Photography Exhibition IRIS ARLES – Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining by Anna Jocham

IRIS ARLES presents an exhibition “Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining” by Austrian photographer Anna Jocham.

Jocham is currently studying fine arts at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and she was selected as one of the winners of Paris Photo’s Carte Blanche Students in 2024, where she had the opportunity to present this “Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining” series during the prestigious fair.
In this series, she repeatedly scans and photocopies analog photographs of everyday scenes she has taken. Through this process, the original images gradually lose their figurative elements and transform more into abstract, graphic images. She then enlarges the transformed images using a photocopier, revealing new images that were not perceptible in their originals.

Roland Barthes described the essence of photography as its existential nature of “that-has-been.” Jocham pushes this essence to its limits, exploring the very critical point of what photography is and where it ends. The photographer also intervenes in the images by moving the original during copying or scanning. Through this intervention, manual devices such as photocopiers and scanners transcend their original purpose of “reproduction” and become drawing tools that proliferate or make disappear lines and surfaces and fix them in place. Thus, Jocham’s images contain traces of “that-has-been” expanded to its limits, as well as variants of those traces, existing simultaneously.

In today’s world, where digitization is advancing, paper documents are being replaced by PDFs, and smartphone photography serves as a form of reproduction and documentation, the act of making copies using a photocopier or scanning using a scanner may already be on the decline, except for certain professions (such as photographers). Jocham’s process fundamentally differs from digital processing that can be completed on devices like Photoshop or AI. Her works embrace organic mutations caused by her intervention in the image and accidental elements that are not controlled by prompts. These elements, which may one day become nostalgic in image-making, hold significant meaning within her bold transformations of images. With seven works of various levels of abstraction, this exhibition visualizes the traces and the transformation of “that-has-been” by Jocham’s photographic writing, drawing our gaze even deeper into this overwhelming visual experience.