Jan von Holleben: Dreams of Flying
I am entranced by von Holleben’s photographs. Taking children as his subjects, he images them in frozen scenes in which they seemingly act out their fantasies, in the seeming motions of play, humour, imagination. (discovered on Superhero Journal and all images from von Holleben’s official site)
And yet, something tugs in these photographs. There is a contradiction in them. While the act of playing, of enactment, is one of energy and hope - here, the children lie flat against the ground. Holleben does not try to hide the earth in these images - where the usual blue sky is expected, instead we are surprised by gravel, the colours of earth. The viewer is positioned from the top, looking down. The children are flattened against earth, strangely captive. Suddenly the ‘frozen’ moment feels stiff - like imprisonment. (Or as Barthes would muse, a typical kind of photographic death - in his fantastic Camera Lucida) As I experienced this feeling I remembered that children are normally full and bursting with energy, life, hard to contain. Here, doubly frozen by the photograph, they pose as a still image and are imaged simultaneously.
They seem to act out their fantasies, but are imprisoned and unable to fulfill them. There is a sense of reach in these images - a kind of outstretched grasp - and yet they invoke for me a sense of hopelessness or immobility. I feel the pull when I look at these images - the feeling of being too still, immobilized and unable to move. This is reinforced by the constant reminder of the ground, the earth, the overwhelming pull of the gravity that holds them there. They evoke nostalgia, longing … despite the moments of humour - the wit of their imaginings. In an alternate reality of dreaming, of the lens, they are heroes, the characters of legend.
According to the Oxford University Press Dictionary:
tableau
…a ‘picture’ formed by living persons caught in static attitudes. Tableaux were sometimes used at the ends of acts in 19th‐century melodrama and farce. The parlour‐game of tableaux vivants (‘living pictures’), in which living people adopt the postures of characters in a famous painting, was also a popular diversion in the 19th century, and is sometimes found in modern pageants. In a story or poem, a description of some group of people in more or less static postures is sometimes called a tableau.
About this series, Dreams of Flying, it is written on von Holleben’s site:
Crossing the desert on the back of a dog, or searching for lost treasures on the bottom of the ocean. Jan von Holleben’s photographs allow children to make their dreams come true.
Jan brings the influences of his parents - a cinematographer and child therapist - to his work. His focus on the visual representation of childhood, ‘Child-History’ and concepts of ‘Playing’, come from his time spent on a teacher training course and he combines these theories with his personal experience and childhood memories. Inspired by classic childhood books as well as modern superheroes, he has made ‘Dreams of Flying’ over the last four years with children from his local neighbourhood in South West Germany.
I can’t help but find this work simultaneously disturbing and invigorating in all the right ways - a clever and interesting series.
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