While Laura Bielau understands photography as a means of social reflection in her work scud, offering a challenging interpretation in her combinations of various picture worlds, she concentrates on photography itself and its context of origin in her work Color Lab Club. She works very personally and makes the history of photography as well as her own relationship to the medium the central theme. Bielau does not try to produce a stiff and dry illustration of the theory of photography, but rather utilizes the pictures� own power of reference to show processes, levels of meaning, techniques and effects of photo-graphy. This headstrong concept becomes most clear in the case of the series Labgirl.
In English, the term darkroom refers to at least two rooms: the darkroom for photographic laboratory work and a place for anonymous, usually fast and eruptive sex. The contrast between two definitions could hardly be greater: clinical immaculateness and purist perfection on the one side, and lust, sexual passion and promiscuity on the other side. The opposite must not necessarily manifest itself: Bielau interprets the term darkroom in her own way and provocatively. She invites professional strippers to dance in the red light of the darkroom and to pose in tantalizing, classical pin-up positions. Thus, sensuality and an idea of sexual availability fill a room that is usually used for down to the second time measurement and the combination of developing solutions. At the same time, fascinating, provocative, lively, disturbing and precise pictures emerge from the laboratory. The Labgirls might be everything in one: professional, calculating and yet attractive.
The discovery of photography marks a historical cesura in the history of pictures, their production, reception and mass distribution. The French government, which bought up the patent and made this technique available to the public, had this fact engraved in stone and set up as a chunky monument on the side of a road somewhere. The monumentalization of this invention, however, says nothing about its potential as an art form. On the contrary. Just as a monument for a long-forgotten war, an important invention seems come to a standstill in stone reverence. Bielau points out: Photography can and must be constantly newly invented, used and interpreted. The statements and meanings of photographs are changeable and lend themselves to interpretation. Perhaps the greatest possibilities to overcome standstill and static manifestation in this medium exist in the context of the visual arts.
[1] Lucinda Devlin, The Omega Suites, G�ttingen 2000 [2] Taryn Simon, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, G�ttingen 2007
