Nikolaus von Wolff: "Lord of the Rings"

Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art Paper

READERS series from 2023

Size: 50 x 50 cm

Edition: 3 + 1 AP

Signed, titled and edition numbered by the artist in pencil on the verso.

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Nikolaus von Wolff, Readers Series – Lord of the Rings

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings , like few other works, represents the power of storytelling, an epic of power, temptation, and resistance. Von Wolff presents it in a scene that, at first glance, appears unspectacular: a young man is engrossed in reading on a train, while outside, figures disappear into the winter landscape. The vast world of Middle-earth enters the room not through fantastical beings, but through the gesture of reading. The work points to the inner journey that reading enables—even in the routines of commuting. Yet the flawless staging, the all-too-perfect interplay of light, pose, and space, bears the stamp of AI. Here, two forms of fiction collide: the literary imagination and the technical simulation of the image. The philosophical core lies precisely in this friction—what is more true, the narrative we believe, or the image that deceives us into believing it?

Here, too, the power of the Readers series becomes apparent: it creates a collection that resembles the visual memory of a generation that devoured books on the trains and buses of the 1980s. But this “archival character” is itself an illusion. Von Wolff uses AI to conjure images that are more precise and unsettling than any classic photograph ever could. In doing so, the series addresses the question of authenticity that is so prevalent in all the arts today. Readers stands at the interface between literature and image, documentation and fiction, memory and invention. It invites us to understand reading not just as an escape, but as a form of self-location – and photography no longer as a reflection of reality, but as a critical mirror of our cultural gaze.