2016 / Fine Art / Portrait

Ghost

  • Photographer
    Merlin Ortner

What is real? What can be real? Should we trust our Mind? Should we trust photography? My works are concepts of perception. In our Mind a hallucination triggers the same areas as a real perception, telling the mind there is no difference between the real and the “not real”. Photography used to be an indicator of something “real”. Today both cannot be trusted. We know too much about the mind and the possible technics in photo manipulation. These are the topics that interest me. Working with the mind, with hallucinations, with disorders in the brain. To see what is happening when the mind works differently from “the norm” when it shows us a parallel world. This I try to accomplish trough photography. Without any manipulation of the image after it has been taken. In this series, I have used an old Box Camera from 1905 to capture the Ghost of Görlitz. It was not easy to accomplish. But after a long journey and steady research in the archives of this very old city, I managed to capture some images of the fragile thing in its natural surroundings.