High-Speed Still Life
Emile Rubino
The rumor goes that when the Lumière brothers first screened The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), the audience ran away screaming at the sight of the oncoming train. Though likely exaggerated, this half-truth persists as part of our mental furniture—like cinema itself, the charming anecdote requires a suspension of disbelief. Similarly, Paul Niedermayer’s exhibition DB at Kunstverein Freiburg relied on viewers engaging with a dubious but enticing assertion about speed and the Deutsche Bahn. A brief statement accompanying the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition informed us that all thirty photographs on view were taken in the dining cars of ICE trains “at a speed of 200 km/h.” For anyone who has recently traveled on the national railway company of Germany, this claim invites wry skepticism.
DB jokes aside, since the first half of the nineteenth century, trains and photography have run hand in hand, collapsing space and freezing time. In Niedermayer’s dining car still lifes, speed and dynamism are conveyed by way of a filter that simulates motion blur and diffuses light to produce astigmatic visions—as if someone had touched the lens with greasy Käsebrezel fingers. In No. 0012 (all works 2025), the effect is such that a porcelain cup in the middle of the frame dissolves into a dazzling smudge beside which we discern the gentle glow of a spoon and the gauzy presence of a damp tea bag. Niedermayer’s ludic engagement with the Pictorialist tropes of creative photography is counterpoised not only by the deadpan realism of her images but also by their sheer beauty; a ray of sunlight through a cold Pils never fails to activate the pleasure center of the brain.
For the Berlin-based artist, who regularly commutes to Leipzig for work, the Bordrestaurant became an on-the-go studio—a “dream location”1 to borrow the term used by Walker Evans when he took to New York’s subway in the late 1930s. Focusing on objects rather than people, Niedermayer anonymizes her fellow commuters even more than Evans did. With the exception of a few hands coming into the frame in No. 0817 or No. 0954, the main protagonists in her pictures are generic coffee mugs and beer glasses—some half full, others half empty.
As art historian Norman Bryson writes in his book Looking at the Overlooked (1990), “still life pitches itself at the level of material existence where nothing exceptional occurs: there is a wholesale eviction of the Event. At this level of routine existence, centered on food and eating, uniqueness of personality becomes an irrelevance. Anonymity replaces narrative’s pursuit of the unique life and its adventures.”2 Yet by evoking movement and a given context, Niedermayer’s still lifes comically seem to gesture toward some kind of event or narrative in a genre that supposedly excludes both.
Set in thin white metal frames with even thinner white passe-partouts, her modestly sized inkjet prints—featuring white plates, napkins, and AirPods cases—were installed in a single row, wrapping around the capacious ground floor of the former swimming pool. As viewers took laps along the three main walls of the space, the irregular rhythm in which the prints were arranged made for a familiar stop-and-go motion. The flow of horizontal pictures with their sunrise- and sunset-like streaks of light was further interrupted by a few vertical photographs of beer glasses. These sharper and less seductive images seemed to hold a separate dialogue across the sequence, as though we’d just removed earbuds to eavesdrop on a conversation unfolding at a nearby table. Their crunchy visual quality indicates they were taken with a cellphone, perhaps on days the artist rushed to catch the train and forgot her camera at home.
Sustained by a steady stream of beer and coffee, Niedermayer’s high-speed tabletop studies are unassumingly confounding. Their Darboven-like numbering implies a system that evades the viewer, as difference and repetition abound, both across the series and within individual pictures. In No. 0540, No. 2167, and No. 2298, seemingly identical cups and glasses appear doubled with disconcerting symmetry like real-life Rorschach tests. These staged instances of binocular diplopia might suggest extreme fatigue after a long day at work or the Deutsche Bahn miraculously bending the laws of physics on the way back to Berlin. If it wasn’t for these pictorial oddities or the crumbs and empty glasses left by customers, some of Niedermayer’s pictures could almost be used as an advertisement. Indeed, the positivist language of velocity and kinetic energy once associated with futurism and constructivism has long been rebranded to serve the demands of 24/7 capitalism.
Niedermayer’s formal rhetoric highlights the ambivalent relationship between reclaiming time and maximizing productivity, a tension that underpins the work of most artists who maintain a day job. As is often the case in her practice, seriality partakes in creating a unity of place and action. In turn, her pictures consistently speak to the conditions of their own making—the rare in-between moments afforded by today’s economy. A popular Deutsche Bahn advertising campaign consciously riffs on this contemporary condition with the slogan Diese Zeit gehört Dir (This time is yours), framing train travel as an opportunity to reclaim time, productively or otherwise. In that regard, Niedermayer’s photographic reveries capture the quiet joy that comes with blurring the boundary between work and leisure on your own terms.
2. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 61