#

Bad Pictures 1997–2010, 2019
Ulrike Königshofer

Bildunterschrift

The artist Ulrike Königshofer’s work often investigates image realities. For Bad Pictures she went in search of the criteria for image quality or image optimisation. Back in the days of analogue photography, she noticed there were no prints of some photos that had appeared on the negative strips. Based on certain aspects such as blurri-ness, backlighting or movement, from the 1980s onwards these photos were rejected by photo labs, initially by hand and later by machines. For her series, Königshofer compiles all of the photos from her private archive that had been deemed bad and worthless, and reproduces them. Within the art context, where they could be seen as expressive, they point to the arbitrariness and changeability of such evaluation criteria in relation to place and time, particu-larly in an age of photo filters and automatic image optimisation.