Artist Captures America Through Photography

Hans Gindlesberger discussed his exhibit “I’m in the Wrong Film: Photographs by Hans Gindlesberger,” at a gallery lecture at the University on Feb. 1. The exhibit is on display at the Hope Horn Gallery through March 1.

Gindlesberger began his work as a photographer in college taking stray, isolated images without a narrative context. He said the images “blended in with what everybody else was doing at the time. Anything that I was doing wasn’t especially distinct or provocative,”

During his sophomore year at Bowling Green State University, his photography professor Lou Krueger taught him how to tell a story with photographs.

“He was a huge influence because he was the first photographer I encountered person-to-person that was working not with the world but with constructed imagery,” Gindlesberger said. “He was fabricating these things to be photographed rather than wandering around and trying to happen upon something.”

These fabricated photographs became the start of Gindlesberger’s storytelling through art.

“I made a lot of disconnected scenes – sort of one frame films – that didn’t tie together in any way, that didn’t tell any big arching story, but were each their own self-contained little narrative,” Gindlesberger said.

The pieces Gindlesberger presents in the exhibit contain images of real places, including some from his hometown in Northern Ohio. The images are also constructed in Photoshop to create his narratives by using technology.

“Photography is a medium that’s interesting, particularly because it has had so many different iterations,” Gindlesberger said. “Technology in the early days changed every three years, but now even more so in a radical and dynamic way.”

The art exhibit will be on display through March 1 in the Hope Horn Gallery, located on the fourth floor of Hyland Hall.