Canadian Art

Fall 2004, pp. 148-9
by Louise Wolthers

Lisa Klapstock: Threshold
Galleri Image, Åarhus, Denmark
May 1-21 , 2004


Lisa Klapstock’s series Threshold brilliantly tricks the viewer into awareness of both his or her own expectations of pictures and photography in general. Klapstock has photographed gaps and knotholes in Toronto alleyway walls and fences, behind which people’s backyards are usually hidden. Our gaze is drawn to the fragment of space beyond the divide where a chair, a window or shrubs can be glimpsed. Attempts to render these fragments symbolically significant or to establish any rational sense of space, however, fail with the realization that the subjects beyond the cracks are not the point of the images.

The small pictures within pictures remind us of looking through a telescope in reverse, pushing the object further away rather than bringing it closer. Klapstock’s focus is the threshold—the boundary between public and private, which raises themes related to the isolation of city life. The images make us wonder if the walls represent enclosure or exclusion. The threshold dominates the image and accentuates the visual barrier between foreground and background, which is simultaneously dissolved by the shallow depth of field, resulting in a merging of the two realms into a single, almost abstract surface.

Klapstock uses a macro lens and enlargements that provide us with a view denied the average pedestrian in the back alleys of Toronto. However, she does not zoom in on private details. The openings appear as opaque specks in a field of colour, reining in any mimetic reading of the photographs. In presenting themselves as non-figurative images, the photographs can be seen in relation to experiments in 20th-century abstract painting. The approach emphasizes Klapstock’s interrogation of the traditional expectation that photography serves as a window onto the world. The medium is not merely an extension of the human eye; the elements of the image, and its surface, also determine the meaning of the photograph.

The hole shapes that recur in the images are reminiscent of the pinhole camera. The “natural camera,” as it was once known, was an expression of the desire for images that matched what the human eye observed and which were thought to provide an unmediated, objective view of reality. Furthermore, the unfocused fences form an amorphous membrane, like the skin that separates bodies from the world. Threshold thus has a transitory quality. It rejects the point of view of the universal spectator capable of surveying everything from a fixed position. Non-monumental, Klapstock’s photographs seem to say that the world can never be absorbed in its entirety, but rather reveals itself in unexpected glimpses.

In the midst of the blurred foreground the sharp subject in the aperture is like a prick or shock—terms that have also been used by theorists like Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin to describe the invasive immediacy of the photographic medium. By exploring boundaries with her camera, Klapstock makes us aware of perceptual limitations. She identifies sight as a fallible source of information and investigates the voyeurism associated with the photographic act.