Bernd Walz  &  Gundula Walz

Pure Light | Pure Photography

Photography is "drawing with light". Pure photography means that the light itself, its color and/or its brightness creates an abstract image on a light-sensitive medium (film or camera chip) without beeing affected by a subject from the human world of experience or, as the Bauhaus Master L. Moholy-Nagy wrote in 1927, the light-sensitive plate fixes the light modeled by mirrors, lenses or transparent crystals etc. 

In traditional, lense based photography the camera creates an image of something around us - a subject. In this project a light beam passes an optical bench where the light is modeled by an optically active sample (pinhole, slit, diffraction grating, opaque stop, spherical lens, color filters etc.). As a result the camera chip captures geometric light patterns, often colorful toned because of the spectral splitting of white light due to light diffraction and dispersion.
May be this explanation sounds terribly scientific, but the project "Pure Light | Pure Photography" is in no way documentary scientific photography. Scientifically, the images are useless, but only an aesthetic outcome of "Pure Photography". My playful approach to a "Pure Photography" is a very personal and exciting journey using endless optical possibilities that lead into a new image world, an image world in which the camera has lost its traditional documentary function.