Explanation of „Lightwriting – The visible Invisible“. Photography:
Since 2010 I have been experimenting with lighting effects in photography. Creating these photographs I act wearing completely black clothes against a black background in a darkened room. I hold long flashlights or work lights in one hand or in both hands, such as those used by car mechanics. With both lamps I "draw" the flow of movements of the hands signing words / sentences. We use flashlights, work lights, flashing LED lights etc., some with electrical power by cable, depending on how flexible we have to be concerning the composition of the picture.
The third generation of my pictures dealing with sign language abstractions and the visible-invisible paintings goes one step further than the first and second one. Whereas in the first generation you were still able to recognize the movements of the hands signing words, sentences and short texts and to some extent to “read” the contents, my latest paintings have become completely abstract.
There is nothing familiar in them to recognize. I compare these paintings to words, sentences and texts, which so to speak remain sitting in the air. Hearing people watching Deaf people signing cannot follow their conversation unless they know sign language. This means that the part of the conversation hearing people take in remains unintelligible to them; the words fade into the air in front of their eyes as soon as they are signed. Vice versa, the situation is the same. Deaf people watching hearing people’s mouth movements are able to understand their words fairly well, only if they have learned how to read lips.
pecifically, young deaf children cannot understand hearing people’s words. To them the spoken words remain sitting in the air, too. All those words which have not been understood because they faded into the air, I made “visible” in my latest paintings using my colors and shapes.
I know this must be hard to understand, but it roughly expresses my feelings working on my most recent paintings.
Dieter Fricke, 2010