Florian Maier-Aichen in "Fantasy" - Season 5 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

We’re in East Germany, in Stralsund, almost to 
the border to Poland, former GDR.

I’m trying to recapture a view of an old postcard of the 
city of Stralsund.

I try to find images that I find interesting, and then I work my way up 
from those images.

The actual image that I get from the lab the next day, that's only half 
of the process.

I work on the images a lot afterwards.

I draw in them. I enhance them, and I construct them to a
degree that's not necessarily linked to actuality anymore.

It’s more like an idealized image, like
maybe the way postcards used to work.

Sometimes I work on the 
images just a week. Sometimes it takes months.

I’m not sure how it's going to work out today, but 
the view is good. There’s no fog, and it's almost as I expected it.

That’s the reference. It’s an 
old photograph of Stralsund back in GDR times, circa 1970.

I like it because it's very sparsely 
lit. It’s very minimal.

You still have those gothic cathedrals in the background, but then 
in the front you have functional buildings, basic shapes.

And then it's very basic. Image cuts in half. You have sky, and then you have this foreground. I like the way it becomes very abstract.

Final image might look much different from this, but 
I kind of like the basic composition of it.

There’s maybe, like, 15 light sources, 
and today, it's not the case anymore.

It’s actually overlit because it's UNESCO 
World Heritage and you can already see that

all the spots are on the domes.

Some of the warehouses have been torn down, and they also constructed this new Gehry type aquarium over there, that white spot.

So I will definitely take 
that out because that's too modern, too white.

I saw this place by accident, because it's a mural 
in a station of Stralsund in East Germany.

It had a very nostalgic German feeling about an old-time 
illustration of Ruegen.

It is a very imprecise image open to your imagination. It doesn't 
give away all the facts.

Maps just give you an idea of a place. They’re like an illustration, 
but they're clearly the opposite of a precise photograph.

This is a photograph of the mural in Stralsund.

I took out the names and descriptions and turned it into
an even more nondescript image.

It was painted in '36, but to me, it stands more for the East German social realist 
era and the glorification of the farmer state.

I took a photograph of the real island when I was there, and it didn't work out to me. It was too flat, and we couldn't get high up enough,

and, of course, it looks very different to the 
illustration, and so I thought the illustration is just another level of abstracting it.

It lifts you to another layer that is not necessarily linked to realism, and it opens 
up your own world or your own mythmaking.

It works fine with an abstract image like June 
Lake, for example.

It’s called "Above June Lake" and it shows a ski resort in the sierras.

We were skiing, and I saw this image at the diner, and I
was instantly struck by it for its abstract qualities,

because it could be an abstract scribble, 
but it could also be a piece of land art,

much more chaotic than just a pure line.

Most of the ski resorts, at least in the Sierras, are below tree line, so they have to cut out the slopes

and basically create this scribble. And this was also one of the photographs that 
I couldn't take myself, because it's clearly an aerial photograph.

Still, though, a very abstract 
and it's very precise like a satellite photograph.

On the other hand, you have Ruegen, which is 
really just like very few brushstrokes and very simple.

Just gives you an illusion or an idea 
of how it could look. So it's very imprecise.

This is a pass in Italy next to the Swiss border.

I’ve been to that pass many times and then all of a sudden, at one point, I saw

postcards of that pass, and I was just struck by the scribble of the serpentines. It’s really just like an abstract gesture.

The Italian engineers made a scribble for me in the image.

I bought all the postcards 
they had to determine if a vantage point is valid enough.

The more images that are taken from one spot, the more
reason for me to take another photograph, in a way.

Those are some of the postcards.
You can always see the serpentines.

This one, it's pretty close to where I was.

That’s a very vintage one.

They would also, just to make it more dramatic, paint in white snow, which I also did on this one, because there wasn't enough snow,

and I want to have those fields of white snow. So I just drew them in myself.

As a reference to the postcards, I thought, "I’ll 
try to use a process that is maybe linked to, like, offset printing

and even old 
color photography.”

It’s called tricolor photography. Take three black and white 
exposures with three different filters: red, blue, and green.

And then you sandwich those three negatives together.
The end result is a color photograph.

But since you're 
sandwiching three photographs together,

they don't register evenly. So there are a lot of irregularities, and then you also have the clouds or anything that moves will create a different color,

'cause there's time between exposures. So

this cloud was only recorded by one exposure. That’s why it turns pink, for example. Or one cloud was only recorded by another exposure. That’s why it turns yellow.

Photography used to be like alchemy back in the 
19th century.

It was a medium of the few, and now it has turned into a mass medium.

Maybe it's reactionary to turn backwards and to try to establish artistry again,

but it's also the most interesting part of the process and not
just like the black box, like a digital camera.

I need to treat each photo individually to determine the right size or scale for it.

Some of the works might be huge vistas, so I hang 'em low so you can actually look downwards to it, and it might work as a map. Or you can inspect every detail.

It needs to be big enough that you can actually get 
lost in one corner without getting distracted by the other corner.

I don't do serial work. I think 
every piece needs its own presentation and scale.

I turned the finished photograph almost back into 
a scribble again.

Usually, a photograph is very precise, very rigorous, and it's an end product. 
And I like to use the end product and turn it into an unfinished state again.

I think its fine to 
combine photography and drawing, for example,

or alter photographs and bring in fictional 
elements, just not be satisfied with photography

as a finished image or a super realistic medium.

I like the idea of using the computer to actually bring in imperfections or to turn a photograph, a finished image into a more open-ended image

so that it's not too precise or so over determined.

The computer has opened up much more possibilities so you can really go into the photograph today, which was hard to do in the early 20th century.

The real beginning was when I came to California, 
because I didn't come here for its scenic beauty.

I came here for the artists that were teaching 
at UCLA, and I thought the art they were doing

was exactly the art that I liked.

I’m always kind 
of critical and think the work is not good enough,

and you are always just this poor photographer 
whose art is usually considered like a side product. It’s not like the real art. It’s 
more some sort of inferior art.

At least that's how it is in Germany. And maybe in the 
US. Photography’s definitely more established,

because photography grew together with 
the discovery of the American West.

There’s a photograph by Watkins 
that's called "The Best General View,"

and I thought this was perfect to take a 
photograph from Glacier Point in Yosemite,

which is the most popular spot towards Half Dome,
which is the most photographed mountain

probably in America, and name it "The Best 
General View."

I like the stage quality. It wasn't a perfect day when I took the photograph. 
It was overcast a little bit, and I didn't mind.

It’s a starting point. I drew in the entire 
background with the blue sky and the clouds,

and I brought in those bushes to bring in some 
foreground-background space.

So in the end, except for half dome, the image is not 
the way it looked when I took the picture.

That’s an image near Santa Clarita 
on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

It shows the remains of the St. Francis Dam.

St. Francis Dam was a failure. Just by researching, we learn about Mulholland and the 
fact that he resigned after the failure of the dam.

Failure usually is the side that nobody 
wants to mention, nobody wants to point out,

and that's the hidden side or the sub 
context in a way.

We’re standing on the dam. This is the vista towards the old former 
lake that was drained when the dam collapsed.

Today it's back to its old nature, and I’m just 
recording basically, like, a straight photograph

of the former lake or the valley.

I’m using the 
photograph as a script.

I was more interested in the abstract qualities when I was researching the dam, and I looked at documents from the day it collapsed in '29.

The picture was almost cut in half. You would see a representational mountain landscape on the top,

and then you would see a drained lake at the bottom, and the drained lake was basically just like an abstract piece, like figures and forms and lines.

The idea was to have a representational 
upper part and to create an abstract lower part,

and you mix the two together.

I’m always more interested in the mixture of those two, which is kind of hard to combine abstraction and representation in one image.

I started with a basic drawing, and then I continue 
to draw into it and turn it more and

more into a scribble that has hundreds of 
layers of dots like a pointillist image.

One of the reasons to come out here to Los 
Angeles, because it's not only exotic in a

certain way, but you understand the culture 
because you grow up with America.

You get a fresh light. You get a new landscape, and 
that landscape is still significant.

It has a great meaning, and it's the end of American 
pioneerism. It’s the end of the American West,

and from a German aspect, it's 
also the end of the world.

[ ANNOUNCER ] To learn more about
Art21: “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

and its educational resources,

please visit us online at:
PBS.org

Art21: “Art in the Twenty-First Century” is available on Blu-Ray and DVD.

The companion book is also available.

To order, visit us online at: shopPBS.org

or call PBS Home Video at:
1-800-PLAY-PBS