The Drifting Skies series is ostensibly about flying, taking off and landing. But in fact the set pieces of runways, taxiways, wings, landscapes and clouds weave themselves into new pictorial tapestries with their very own connotations.
The photographer makes experimental use of the panorama function of her smartphone camera and outsmarts its algorithm by using the movement of the plane rather than her own. The artist consciously incorporates the technical skill and weaknesses of the camera, determines the process and goes beyond the programmed frame.
The camera invents, copies arbitrarily, leaves out and drifts away – parts of the passing (airport) landscape and the sky condense into artifacts. So these are inventions from the camera (and not compositions created later on the computer).
Through the provoked simultaneousness and condensation of what is seen, Julia Baier steps out of the question of spatiality and removes the temporal limitation. Real fictions emerge that move between photography and cinematic fragment and confuse our concept of reality, a concept shaped and directed by technology.
Some of the photographs date from a time when flying was a regular side effect to Julia Baier’s job as a photographer. In the pictures, she does not treat the landscape with care, she deliberately destroys it, she fragments it. The world, or rather its perception, is shaken.
The artist does not provide any answers. But through this procedure she questions her previous dealing with flying and global travel. Isn’t it overdue to rethink and to shape her future professional life differently in this respect?
The fractures become a metaphor for a doubt that has long since arisen.
