The relationship of personal biography to current work (part of a series of talks for the 11th International Photography Symposium)

Nowadays, biographies are produced in all kinds of media about people of all walks of life. According to historian Robert Gerwarth, contemporary audiences are more and more intrigued by the complex profile of the villain, such as Reinhard Heydrich who was the subject of his 2011 biography “Hitler’s Hangman”. While biographers like Gerwarth research and reconstruct a person’s life journey, and explain contexts and motivations that revive the social and political milieu of the past, artists often fictionalize life and events. This may not have to do with the intentions of the artist but rather with the essential and inevitable process of translating life and events in artworks. What is the difference between a painted and a photographed self-portrait? How much influences the hand of the maker the image? While painting always tells a story of image (what is depicted) and process (how it is depicted), photography likewise uses forms of manipulation that may fictionalize the captured subject. If creating an image brings forth questions on the subject, theme, setting, composition, light, atmosphere and technique, isn’t then every image a deception, as the Belgian surrealist René Magritte provoked in his 1929 artwork “The Treachery of Images”? If it is true that art facilitates a reflective, metaphorical, interpretative, conceptual, spontaneous (…) perspective on life, how then can an artist work with biography as a genre? And, how then do audiences read such artworks? Is factuality important or do we long for fictions?