The exhibition Wastelands by Arthur Hoffmann explores light and the stratification of images through an exclusively analog practice, where material experimentation and the deliberate alteration of the photographic support redefine our relationship to places. Rather than documenting these spaces with objective fidelity, Hoffmann subjects them to manipulations that reveal their instability, their shifting and fragmented nature.
His approach is based on the assemblage of visual and luminous layers, achieved through a unique process: he collects polarizing filters from old television screens, which he folds, crumples, burns, scratches, and superimposes before integrating them into his photographic setup. These manipulations modify light at the very moment of capture, generating color interferences, shifting reflections, and transparency effects that owe nothing to digital tools. It is these transformed filters that sculpt the image and give it its vibrant materiality.
At times, his compositions combine these light effects with fragments of urban landscapes that he photographs himself. Yet, far from being a simple superimposition, the layering of these elements creates a hybrid space, an unprecedented territory where remnants of reality merge with luminous abstraction. The image, constructed through additions and subtractions of material, becomes the site of a visual recomposition, where color and light engage in a free dialogue with the instability of surfaces.
In Hoffmann’s work, light is not merely an optical phenomenon—it is a bearer of memory. From the earliest photographs to digital images, light has been the medium that captures, preserves, and transforms the visible. But here, far from being a mere tool of revelation, it becomes a material in itself, an active element that shapes the image and alters our perception of it.
By manipulating polarizing filters recovered from television screens, Hoffmann reintroduces an altered memory of light itself—light from devices designed to transmit images, now repurposed and stripped of their original function. Once deformed and layered, these filters act as memory strata: they retain fragments, modify contours, erase certain parts while revealing others. They remind us that every image is a trace, a persistence of light that endures beyond the moment of capture.
This exploration echoes the way photography has, since its origins, maintained a paradoxical relationship with time and memory. Like Man Ray’s solarizations, where the image seemed to emerge from a collision between shadow and light, Hoffmann’s works play with persistence and alteration, granting a new physicality to photography. His images are not mere captures; they are sculpted by gestures that transform them into luminous objects in their own right.
Hoffmann’s experimentation also resonates with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields, where light is no longer merely a means of revealing a subject but becomes the subject itself. In his prints, photography no longer captures an external scene; instead, it records the direct impact of electricity on film, turning the image into a luminous imprint. Similarly, Wastelands proposes a type of photography where light is modeled, deformed, and stratified—not as a mere recording, but as a phenomenon in flux.
Through his approach to the materiality of photography and the deconstruction of the medium, Hoffmann also engages in a dialogue with Wolfgang Tillmans’ work, particularly his Freischwimmer series and his explorations of camera-less photography. Like Tillmans, he interrogates the relationship between light, surface, and perception, playing with transparencies and chance occurrences that allow for a controlled randomness. In his works, light moves through layers of matter, revealing unpredictable chromatic variations, bearing witness to a process in which the image is never fully fixed but always in the making.
By moving away from digital sharpness and the illusion of a fixed and immutable image, Hoffmann positions his work within a photographic practice that embraces disappearance and erosion as integral parts of its process. His images, marked by deformations, creased areas, or erasures, embody a memory in tension—not only that of the places he photographs but also that of the light that reveals and transforms them.
Thus, Wastelands does not merely capture liminal spaces; it records their passage, their alteration, their mutation. Through his broken filters and analog manipulations, Hoffmann invites us to see these landscapes differently—not as forgotten territories but as surfaces traversed by luminous remnants, fragile traces of a world in perpetual recomposition.