Literature

The photographs in Gersht’s most recent series, Fusing Time (2022), depict elaborate floral arrangements

based upon 17th century Dutch still life paintings. Captured in the process of exploding, Gersht´s arrangements

are literally frozen in motion, a process dependent upon the advanced technology of photography to freezeframe

action, inconceivable to the old masters. This visual occurrence that is too fast for the human eye to

process and can only be perceived with the aid of technological devices, is what Walter Benjamin called the

‘optical unconsciousness ’in his seminal essay ‘A Short History of Photography’.

Gersht´s photographs allude to the inherent shadow of death and decay hanging over Old Master Still Life and

vanitas paintings, complete with moths hovering above the explosions.

Technology has aided Gersht in creating contemporary versions of frozen life, bringing the concerns of still life

masters into a contemporary context.

By basing his photographs upon paintings within the long-established art historical tradition of Still Life

painting, Gersht draws attention to the painterly nature of his photographs which closely resemble these

works. Yet they are distanced due to the instantaneous digital process which captures sequences of images at

a rate of 2000 per second and stores the information immaterially as data on a hard drive, until the selected

images are processed, combined together, and scaled up with an AI software, which, analyses the captured

images and recognises details and structures and “completes” the image with its acquired knowledge that it

had obtained in the lab.

This AI software was trained with thousands of images with different resolutions to learn how to distinguish

poorly up-sampled images from high-quality up-sampled images. During this training period the software learn

to recognise certain structures within the image. This information is used later as a reference to complete and

achieve high-quality upscale images.

Gersht is using this software to upscale very small original files into very large photographic prints. In doing so

he pushes the software to its upscaling limits, resulting in images that are fusing the original optical captures

with the digital interpretations of the AI machine. This process allows Gersht to produce hybrid realities where

the boundaries between the material and the virtual worlds are a melting down.

Flowers, which often symbolise peace, become victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in

destruction. This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and creation, is enhanced by

the collision of the age-old need to capture “reality” and the potential of photography to question what that

actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been shattered, but new

possibilities to experience reality in a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.