Beate Gütschow

Studying Photography and Painting, Then Turning to How Images Work

Born in Mainz in 1970, Gütschow studied at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg from 1993 to 2000 and spent 1997 at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her teachers included Bernhard Blume and Wolfgang Tillmans^*12. Studying photography and painting together gave her a basis for asking what makes an image appear real, without treating one medium as superior to the other.

Gütschow has said that “every image has a reference outside itself”^*13. A photographed tree or building retains a place, a light, and a moment. When such fragments are arranged within a historical composition, the specificity of photography and the deliberate construction of the whole can operate together. After graduation, she continued to examine how pictorial forms produce ideas of idyll and utopia^*5. An interview introduced by the Academy of Media Arts Cologne describes an artist who designs images through drawing, photographic fragments, and montage^*21.

The Düsseldorf School and Digital Compositing in the 1990s

When Gütschow began the LS works in the late 1990s, the precise architectural and industrial photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher and the Düsseldorf School remained a major reference for photographic description in Germany. At the same time, digital processing was changing from a means of retouching photographs into an environment for designing entire images. In another conversation, Gütschow argued that understanding the world requires an understanding of the technologies that support its images^*22.

She placed fragments made with an analog camera onto an empty digital canvas. An official text describes this “pre-photographic method,” in which the composition is determined in advance, while also referring to the documentary formats of Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer^*17. Leaves, clouds, roads, and buildings remain tied to real sites and moments, but montage changes their distance, geography, and perspective. The Hamburger Kunsthalle presents the results as images that recall known cities and landscapes yet lead back to no actual place^*6. Documentary precision and digital construction allow trust in individual details to support a nonexistent whole.

LS—Constructing Photographs Through Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Landscape Painting

The LS series digitizes trees, clouds, fields, water, and buildings photographed in different places with a medium-format camera and assembles them into single landscapes. According to the official description, the process begins with a collection of analog photographs and continues in Photoshop, where Gütschow adopts the expansive perspective and theatrical arrangement of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting^*16. Cut trees, weeds, corrugated metal, and trampled ground enter orders reminiscent of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Jacob van Ruisdael.

The central issue is the compositional rule that allows foreground, middle ground, and distance to make a contemporary photograph read as “landscape.” The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago exhibited LS and S as two series concerned with historical genres and photographic reference^*1. The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation likewise explains how a limited set of compositional conventions can make a photograph recognizable as a painterly landscape^*11.

Why Photographed Details Make the Fictional Whole Convincing

The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes LS #3 as an image whose individual parts are photographically specific while the whole remains a calculated fabrication^*2. The contours of leaves, wetness of soil, and density of clouds derive from things that stood before the camera. Fully computer-generated imagery would lack that relation from the outset. Straight photography, by contrast, cannot easily gather foreground, middle ground, and distance from separate sites and exchange their geography. Montage lets photographed fact and constructed place coexist. Once the viewer trusts the whole through the certainty of its details, the process by which a photograph is accepted as a place becomes perceptible.

S—Turning Postwar Modernist Architecture into a Nonexistent City

The S series constructs monochrome cities from buildings, roads, rubble, and people photographed in different countries. The official text connects the work to modernist faith in planning and technology, and to the expansionist thinking that continued into the 1970s. It also identifies the black-and-white format as a reference to American documentary photography of the 1960s and 1970s^*17. Linear façades, pedestrian bridges, vacant lots, and damaged concrete create a fictional stage where ideals of rationality and equality have decayed. The work condenses an architectural ideology shared across nations into one nonexistent city. A Prix Pictet artist text likewise presents architecture as an expression of social ideals and explains the gathering of similar urban spaces into a single imagined metropolis^*3.

Sparse Figures, Architecture, and Power

Figures appear sparsely in S, less as protagonists than as small measures of architecture and open space. The Berlinische Galerie notes that the works refer simultaneously to modern and postmodern buildings and to the accumulated conventions of architectural photography^*4. The near-absence of people lends the images the appearance of neutral architectural records, yet streets, walls, plazas, and open sightlines organize movement in advance. A 2025 book talk connects Gütschow’s long-term urban research to structures of power and social control^*14. The gaze that appreciates architecture as form overlaps with the system through which architecture distributes bodies.

LS #3—Contemporary Time Inside an Ideal Landscape

LS #3 brings the stable depth of classical landscape painting into contact with the high-resolution surface of photography. The Met explains that the work was assembled from numerous photographs and consciously follows seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composition^*2. Every natural element was photographed, yet the fragments do not belong to one weather system, season, or site. The image achieves the order of an ideal landscape while contemporary details interrupt its claim to timelessness, showing how landscape is repeatedly seen through earlier pictures.

LS#17 and Shifting Viewing Distance in the Large-Scale Print

From a distance, the Guggenheim’s LS#17 reads as a continuous landscape; at close range, inconsistencies in vegetation and terrain emerge^*9. The museum’s artist page allows the LS works in its collection to be viewed in relation to one another^*8. The large print joins the total composition associated with painting to the minute information of photography. The viewer moves back to receive the ideal scene and forward to examine origins and seams. This movement repeats the act of believing the image before testing it.

Untitled, 2001—Numbering That Withholds Geographic Identification

SFMOMA’s Untitled, 2001 withholds the location promised by the image through a title without a place name^*10. Series labels and numbers reduce geographic explanation and present the works as comparable images. The cool organization recalls Düsseldorf typology, while each picture has left the record of a single subject behind and operates as a self-contained fiction assembled from memory and rules. The appearance of classification is applied to an image with no stable referent.

HC—Using Photogrammetry to Remove Central Perspective

HC photographs an urban park in as many as 150 exposures, then uses photogrammetry to generate a polygon mesh from corresponding points. According to the official account, Gütschow projects the photographic surfaces onto this three-dimensional data and converts the scene in 3D software into oblique or parallel projection, where depth lines no longer converge on a single point^*18. The title derives from hortus conclusus, the enclosed garden, and refers to medieval manuscript images made before central perspective was codified. Removing the monocular perspective built into the camera gives walls, benches, plantings, and ground comparable visual weight. Photographic detail and nonphotographic space coexist within one image.

The 2007 LS/S Exhibition and the Early Reception of Composite Photography

In 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago exhibited LS and S together. It connected the former to the pastoral order of seventeenth-century landscape painting and the latter to the ruined city of 1950s and 1960s architectural and documentary photography^*1. A Newcity review that year described the color landscapes and large monochrome cityscapes as two series moving between photographic modernism and postmodernism^*20. Early reception focused on the technical fluency of the composites and on the pairing of ideal nature with urban debris. The exhibition made it possible to compare how images from different eras organized social visions of the future.

Idyll, Failed Utopia, and the Contemporary City

Deichtorhallen’s exhibition IDYLLE treated the idyll as a form where dream and deception meet and placed Gütschow’s artificial landscapes within that critical lineage^*7. An interview program at the Museum Angewandte Kunst framed constructed images as a way to think about “imagined reality,” rather than simply as examples of deception^*13. The beauty of landscape and the deterioration of the city become different historical moments in the design of desirable societies through images.

Using the Düsseldorf School’s Documentary Clarity for a Fictional Whole

Gütschow addressed documentary reference and image construction at roughly the same time as Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Demand. The official text for S refers to the authenticating documentary forms used by Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer^*17. In the lineage of the Bechers, standardized conditions made architectural comparison possible. Gütschow uses comparable clarity to gather fragments from Berlin, Chicago, Kyoto, Los Angeles, New York, and Sarajevo into one city^*1.

The detail of each building makes its former existence credible, but nothing proves that the buildings ever stood in one city. Gütschow’s decisive move was to direct the Düsseldorf School’s visual authority toward a fictional whole. The appearance of documentary photography shifts from a guarantee of reality into material for examining how an urban image becomes believable.

Exchanging the Rules of Landscape, City, and Perspective Through Photographic Fragments

LS borrows the foreground–middle ground–distance structure of painters such as Claude Lorrain. S combines modernist buildings from around the world with corroded walls, rubble, and vacant land in one city. Gütschow has described S as treating architecture as a representation of ideology and photographing the deterioration of structures built on faith in progress^*3. HC converts photogrammetric data into parallel projection and creates a space unlike the central perspective built into a camera^*19. Because all three series begin with photographic fragments, their differences can be traced to changing compositional systems. Painting, architectural ideology, optics, and software can be compared without confusing them with changes in subject matter. SFMOMA’s The More Things Change included Gütschow in a broader reexamination of the boundary between record and construction in contemporary photography^*15. Across the three series, she retains photographed fragments while changing composition, geography, and perspective to test which elements make a place feel real.