DETLEF ORLOPP "KÖPFE"

“look at my human heads – into them too I have traced this
noon which takes the shape on us of a face the line of the
eyebrows / the cheekbones / the mouth and gaze that begin
to express something as soon as they step back into the white
and everything fleeting is lost on the paper / they then
become the individual to which the light unmasks us: pierces
us dissolved by it / not mask and also not person – but
individual: indivisibly spellbound between beginning and end /
silvery the eyes wide open / the face symmetrically filling the
pictorial axes of coordinates they stare at them silently: so
motionless and open challenging us to see that of which we
are made – it reveals itself in that which the light leaves of us
/ the night that turns into day in a darkroom / shot and grit
that as such become light again / regardless of how
unpredictably abysmal we are and how passionately proud or
powerful we give ourselves: we are but a contact print of
nature / shadow only in its life” text: raoul schrott.

The face both reveals and conceals something. Detlef Orlopp
(*1937 in Elbing, West Prussia) started his large-format
photographic series of facial studies in the 1960s. Comparable
to his works of lakes and mountain slopes, we are looking at
an objective cartography of human, and primarily female,
facial traits. In these timeless, analogue, black-and-white
photos, the artist not only avoids any sense of proportio divina
but also of adopting a godlike perspective. The serial recording
of the earth’s surface develops parallel to the recording of
human physiognomies, which evoke a sense of wonder about
how every diverse detail can turn into something typical. The
viewer senses the misconception that the face reflects the
individual’s authenticity – on the contrary, here the face
becomes the arena of a self in which history is mirrored.

The face only “turns into a face when it comes into contact
with other faces, when it looks at them or is looked at in
return,” writes Hans Belting. In Orlopp’s portraits, we
therefore see faces in the process of being looked at. They do
not show the “natural” in the sense of the naturalistic,
according to John Anthony Thwaites, but rather the human
countenance as a symbol. The snapshot is part of the very
“nature” of photography, yet Orlopp steeps these moments in
a period of seeing and being-seen – a silence, as Orlopp would
say. In these facial traits, we seem to find the same dignity
and quietude of his photographs of mountain slopes – not,
however, as the mirror of the portrayed person’s soul, but as a
site reflecting the elementary ambiguousness of the face, of
man and of nature.

Bearing the title “nur die Nähe – auch die Ferne” (just so close
– but distant too), Museum Folkwang devoted a large
retrospective to the artist Detlef Orlopp which can now also be
seen at Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg. Text:
Birgit Kulmer.