Inspired by photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Dr. Harold Edgerton, German photographer Martin Klimas uses his camera to capture ephemeral instances of motion and destruction. His works are of subjects seen in the razor-thin moments of transition and chaos.
Klimas graduated with a degree in Visual Communications and Photography from Düsseldorf, where he lives and works. He’s been exhibited in places such as Quebec, Berlin, TelAviv, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Descriptions of his works and his process appear in the captions below.
Above image: Photograph by Martin Klimas of a ceramic figure in the process of destruction.
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According to the Foley Gallery, Klimas uses one strobe light and a single sheet of film for his shoots. In the case of these ceramic figures, he’s capturing them in the moment they fall and break into pieces. The photographer isn’t interested in destruction, as much as he is looking to capture a narrative that creates new, informal structures.
Although Klimas’s goal is more abstract that mere chaos, destruction is very much a part of the story these figures tell, particularly the athletes and martial artists which appear to shatter from their own physical exertions.
To make his Flowers series, Klimas arranged flowers inside vases against monochrome backgrounds. They are photographed once and only once, the camera being set off by the sound of a spring-fired steel ball aimed at the vase. In addition to capturing a loose form of ceramic shards in flux, the flowers above exude a stillness as their container, safety and source of nourishment is obliterated from underneath them.
While the ceramic figures and the shattering vases have an overt narrative, Klimas’s photographs of exploding flowers are his process in its most unaltered form; a single object is captured as it transitions into an array of particulate matter. According to This Is Colossal, the process here is similar to an old demonstration you may have seen in your high school science class: a flower is soaked in liquid nitrogen and shattered. Rather than striking the flower against a lab table, Klimas destroyed the flowers by shooting them with an air gun. The photography portion isn’t explained with as much detail as the earlier sets, but perhaps we can assume his camera was triggered by the sound of the gun.
scintillating
Beautiful!