Andreas Rentsch

Andreas Rentsch’s work is disconcerting. In one person, he is a photographer, a performance artist and a painter. Working with a Polaroid 55, the famous instantaneous development technique producing a unique picture, Rentsch photographs his own body in the dark by illuminating it with a flashlight. He develops the film, and lets the development process to continue for weeks, sometimes months. The result, appearing only when the negative and the positive are separated, reveals tormented scenes. Son of a prison warden, marked since childhood by prisoners’ condition, Rentsch is shocked when discovering the images from Abu Ghraib. Through this series he meditates on the vulnerability and oppression due to incarceration.