IMAGES FROM A MILLION YEARS

The Eternal Landscapes of Konrad Goetz

Text: LAPIS magazine, Munich, Germany, 2000

As we gather life experiences and gain insights, we more clearly understand the ancient truth that all things are interdependent. Full of mysteries and synchronicities, the world becomes like a wonderful clockwork, a network with meaningful meeting points, a plexus of appropriate paths. We gradually abandon the notion of "accidental coincidences"

We are surprised to discover interdependencies in places where we never expected to find them, for example, in a small piece of stone. Our blind feet tread unaware upon this world of stones, fossils and crystals - a world which often begins less than a meter beneath us. Just below the soil lies the mineral kingdom - a realm which is older, larger and more diverse than the other kingdoms of nature. And we can discover the same marvelous clockworks in each little piece of stone, if we are open enough to look closely.

One day, German paleontologist Karl Albert Frickhinger gave a fossil to photographer Konrad Goetz. The scientist asked the photographer to document the specimen. When Konrad Goetz began his work, he realized that he had embarked on an incredible journey. Beyond the scientific significance of the fossil, Goetz felt as if his gaze could penetrate the stone and discover a bizarre, primordial, inner landscape. A place without time.
A delicate, living space full of light and colors- all in the midst of a stone. And he photographed that landscape.

Ever since the earliest days of his work with a camera, landscapes have been one of Konrad Goetz´s favorite themes. It was all the more astonishing for him to find landscapes awaiting him within an old stone - landscapes, which have always been represented in myths, poems and paintings. Figurative or fantastic, direct or symbolic, violent, or simple and still.

Since taking that first photograph of a primordial landscape, Konrad Goetz has gradually filled his atelier with an ever-growing collection of petrified woods, opals, agates, carnelians, ammonites, tourmalines and primordial algae. His gaze has developed progressively deeper to reveal finer, more delicate details. In just three millimeters of opal, Goetz discloses a lively scene replete with small spatial depth and visions of the primal forces that originally created the opal. We can recognize Empedocles´ elements: fire, water, earth and air. We can feel vast currents which, during the early epochs of our planet´s life, gave rise to mountains and created the ocean basins.

As beholders, we experience an emotional response, an inward recognition of these "eternal landscapes". Their documentary value lies in their relationship to the unconscious. We feel as though a hidden image of past times lies before us, as though we could live through an instant in the history of earth - and in our own history. Something inside us "knows" these pictures, recognizes in them the miraculous clockworks of the world, encounters in them a kind of infinity.

But these photographs are more than just mythical, primordial landscapes that occupy our imagination. They are also pictures of real objects and as such they have an unquestionable documentary value. We can see the rhythmic bands of individual layers of chalcedony in the agates, distinguish many-million-year-old cellular structures in the petrified woods, and discern pigments and extremely delicate structures in the first stromatolites - fossilized primordial algae which flourished more than two billion years ago.

It is this double play between reality and imagination which opens us to Konrad Goetz´ photographs. They restore our connection to a cosmos of feelings and thoughts which is original, open and fearless.Anything is possible in this space: nothing is hidden and something new is always coming into being. The photos manifest a truth beyond our conceptual thought.

They are a meditation about creation itself......

Petrified Wood
©KonradGoetz/MACROPHOTOGRAPHY