Nikolaus von Wolff: "Ways of Seeing"

Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art Paper

READERS series from 2023

Size: 40 x 23 cm

Edition: 3 + 1 AP

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

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John Berger's Ways of Seeing is considered a milestone in visual cultural criticism: a work that exposes our perception of images and their ideological implications. Von Wolff stages it by showing a young woman on a bus, engrossed in reading, while life around her persists in its everyday routine. In this concentration, a silent counterworld emerges, a space for thought in public transit. But the image itself is also an interrogation of seeing: the flawless composition, the precise light, the subtle unreality of the moment. Just as Berger taught that we always see through cultural grids, this work also points to the fact that we have long since seen through technological filters. AI leaves its mark not as an effect, but as a subtle irritation—an excess of perfection that forces us to question the supposed authenticity of the scene.

In the context of the Readers series, this work unfolds its full resonance. Nikolaus von Wolff has created a visual archive that appears to date back to the late 1970s or early 1980s, when black-and-white documentary photography reigned supreme. Yet instead of capturing a memory, he creates a memory that never was. AI serves not as a substitute for photography but as a philosophical tool that inextricably interweaves reality and simulation. Readers depicts people with books, but also books as a mirror of human self-questioning. Each scene questions how we view the past today—as longing, as fiction, as construction. In this respect, the series is more than nostalgia: it is a commentary on the culture of the image, in which truths are negotiable and authenticities have become fleeting. Von Wolff shows us that “seeing” is never innocent—neither in art nor in the present of AI-supported image production.