In his digitally altered photographs Christian de Lutz questions the authenticity of the photo-
graph when compared to the television image or virtual sources (such as the internet). His
use of montage is of fundamental importance to his work process. The altered image be-
comes distanced from its original context (as a documentary photograph). The viewer is de-
nied information pertaining to the exact origin or situation of the photo, to the advantage of a
new criterion. A new context develops somewhere between a simulated media (the TV im-
age) and montaged text commentary. This text presents a further hurdle as it is written in un-
familiar languages (the artist has chosen languages all of which have fewer than 10 million
speakers). For example the work Arben shows a Macedonian-Albanian politician, with a
Serbian text ("Arben [goes] to Europe"). In another example Lil' Mother, an image of an old
woman from Eastern Europe is montaged with a text band in Irish (trans. "Who are your
people, lil' mother?"). The artist combines image and text from different parts of the continent
and therefore creates an unexpected patchwork of the new Europe.

How does one see this image as its original content has been lost during the work process
and refilled by a new and arbitrary combination of image and text? De Lutz provokes the
viewer in two ways: by cropping the corners and edges and adding parallel stripes the image
becomes immediately recognizable as a TV image. The picture insinuates itself as a still from a video, which in fact never existed. The artist has transformed the image into a trompe l'œuille of a video still, and then added a new narrative context in the form of a subtitle.

What is brought to the surface here is the ephemeral character of the video still as still image, which during the showing of a TV film or documentary can hardly be perceived. It is as if
one had turned on the television and seen the image, without initially understanding the con-
text: we are confronted with a group of peacekeepers on patrol. Removed from its original
context, the image ironically seems more not less 'real'.

The artist remarked that "the photograph has become a dated medium. As a purveyor of
'reality' it has been superseded by the TV image and more recently by the internet with its
plethora of text and image."

De Lutz has gone beyond his TV series and explored the world of virtual image and text in a
series of new works such as Meta content. Taken from a b&w photograph of the Mace-
donian capital Skopje, the photograph has been transformed, by negative inversion and the
adding of a green tone, into a simulated 'night vision' picture. On a further level the artist has
superimposed raw html text from a web page on Nationalism and the Internet by media
scholar Denisa Kera. The artist noted "the fact that one can use a night vision device to see
in the dark is more real than reality itself, which in this case is darkness."

Besides his work on the relationship between Photography and TV and virtual imaging,
Christian de Lutz has created a group of works that discuss the origin of Photography itself.
As with his other series he has started with documentary photographs that he took as a pho-
tojournalist in the 1990s, and reworked them with computer software.

In The De-mining Demonstration an American soldier in Bosnia demonstrates de- mining
equipment to a group of soldiers from various military factions. What the viewer sees though,
appears not to be a photograph but a watercolor or oil painting. De Lutz has consciously
simulated the painting technique that we associate with history Painting, especially 19th cen-
tury realism (such as Manet's Execution of the Emperor Maximilian from 1867), as well
as the various 'political realisms' of the 20th century.

In Zajac's Folly the artist shows an encounter between an American officer and a group of
Bosnian Serb civilians. On the left a group of journalists record the encounter. Once again
the spontaneity of the photograph has been replaced by a painterly sense of historical por-
trayal. Looking at such a picture, one automatically scrutinizes it for sentimental, represen-
tative and political connotations, which are evoked by its painterly technique.

One also recalls that photography was itself born in the 19th century and has never totally
shaken off the aesthetic and ideological baggage it inherited from realist painting. The works
of Christian de Lutz challenge the supposed authenticity inherent in both the concept of the
'real' and in photography itself.

-text by Regine Rapp