The photographs in Gersht’s most recent series, Fusing Time (2022), depict elaborate floral arrangements
based upon 17th century Dutch still life paintings. Captured in the process of exploding, Gersht´s arrangements
are literally frozen in motion, a process dependent upon the advanced technology of photography to freezeframe
action, inconceivable to the old masters. This visual occurrence that is too fast for the human eye to
process and can only be perceived with the aid of technological devices, is what Walter Benjamin called the
‘optical unconsciousness ’in his seminal essay ‘A Short History of Photography’.
Gersht´s photographs allude to the inherent shadow of death and decay hanging over Old Master Still Life and
vanitas paintings, complete with moths hovering above the explosions.
Technology has aided Gersht in creating contemporary versions of frozen life, bringing the concerns of still life
masters into a contemporary context.
By basing his photographs upon paintings within the long-established art historical tradition of Still Life
painting, Gersht draws attention to the painterly nature of his photographs which closely resemble these
works. Yet they are distanced due to the instantaneous digital process which captures sequences of images at
a rate of 2000 per second and stores the information immaterially as data on a hard drive, until the selected
images are processed, combined together, and scaled up with an AI software, which, analyses the captured
images and recognises details and structures and “completes” the image with its acquired knowledge that it
had obtained in the lab.
This AI software was trained with thousands of images with different resolutions to learn how to distinguish
poorly up-sampled images from high-quality up-sampled images. During this training period the software learn
to recognise certain structures within the image. This information is used later as a reference to complete and
achieve high-quality upscale images.
Gersht is using this software to upscale very small original files into very large photographic prints. In doing so
he pushes the software to its upscaling limits, resulting in images that are fusing the original optical captures
with the digital interpretations of the AI machine. This process allows Gersht to produce hybrid realities where
the boundaries between the material and the virtual worlds are a melting down.
Flowers, which often symbolise peace, become victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in
destruction. This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and creation, is enhanced by
the collision of the age-old need to capture “reality” and the potential of photography to question what that
actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been shattered, but new
possibilities to experience reality in a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.
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