Michael Janiszewski

Born in Berlin, Developing Private Photographic Actions in Munich

Janiszewski was born in Berlin in 1957 and began making private actions solely for the camera in Munich in the early 1990s. Principal sources identify gender, politics, religion, order, hierarchy, and belief as continuing subjects.^*1 From the beginning, he attached masks, women’s clothing, clerical-looking garments, and everyday objects to bodies, repeatedly photographing the moment at which dress, posture, and ritual assign role and authority to a figure. The scenes do not explain a social situation directly. They condense domination, submission, desire, and awe into one bodily image. ^*2

Private Actions between Public Performance and Staged Photography

Since the 1960s, performance photographs have often preserved actions first carried out before an audience. During the 1980s and 1990s, staged photography increasingly relied on scenes planned in advance through methods associated with cinema and advertising. Janiszewski repeated actions in rooms without spectators and searched for images that emerged from combinations of actor, costume, and prop during the shoot. Camera Austria describes this production as an action of “finding images through photography.”^*2 The finished photograph contains prior direction and the unexpected posture or relation among objects produced during the action.

Janiszewski called the works “images”; cameras and printing technology served the private actions that generated them. Photography remained necessary because it could condense a private action into one frame and bring together roles, religious symbols, and everyday objects that would be difficult to sustain simultaneously in life. The action ended behind closed doors; only the selected instant circulated outside. The photograph occupies the boundary between record and artwork: it documents the action and becomes its sole form of public appearance. Because the author remains outside the frame, the strange actor or figure also directs attention toward the power that assigned the posture and selected the moment. ^*2

Masks and Costumes Attach Social Roles to the Body

Combining masks, women’s clothing, religious garments, and everyday objects with an actor’s body makes gender and authority appear as roles assembled through gestures and signs. Heinz Schütz describes the work as beginning with gender performance and extending toward politics, religion, order, hierarchy, and belief.^*1 A mask conceals the identity of a person and reveals the signs through which the viewer recognizes a social role.

A Relation to Surrealism: Everyday Objects That Lose Their Use

Images in which everyday objects, bodies, and religious symbols collide without causal connection recall Surrealist photography. Camera Austria discusses the paradoxical combination of ordinary fragments through oppressive appearances, transformation, fetishization, scandal, and delusion. Familiar objects temporarily lose their usual function and authority, while the clear photograph fixes dreamlike irrationality with precision. ^*2

Exaggerated clothes, cloth figures, and disproportionate props can be comic, although the sense of enclosure and bodily passivity remains. In the “shrill comedy” identified by Schütz, clerical-looking garments and postures of obedience produce awe and absurdity at once.^*3 The viewer immediately recognizes the signs of authority and laughs at their excess. Attraction and distance continue within the same image.

After Loss, a Shift from Actors to Cloth Figures

After a shoot in September 1994, Janiszewski nearly stopped working for about three years while mourning the suicide of a close friend. When he resumed in 1997, he replaced human actors with life-size cloth figures, continued that method through 2003, and brought back an earlier actor in 2004.^*4 The figure does not resist, tire, or deviate from the director’s instructions. Its properties emphasize both the absence of a body after loss and the artist’s control over the body as material for an image. The shift begins with the concrete difference between collaborating with an actor and manipulating a figure; a psychological symbol alone cannot account for it. ^*2

Fotoarbeiten 1990–1999: Actors, Interruption, and the Period of the Figures

Published in 2000, Fotoarbeiten 1990–1999 contains twenty-one black-and-white and forty-eight color illustrations, bringing together distinct phases across a decade.^*4 The actions with actors, a three-year interruption, and the transition to cloth figures make it possible to trace changes in who produces the image and in the absence or presence of the directed body.

I Had a Dream and the Logic of Dreams

In I Had a Dream (1992), published in the 1997 issue of Camera Austria, body and everyday object lose their ordinary causal relation, while mask and clothing assign the figure a role.^*5 Dream withholds a confessional narrative of the artist’s inner life. It serves as the rule of a frame in which the function of objects and the posture of the body no longer align. The clarity of photographic detail intensifies the irrationality of the event, leaving the viewer unable to settle on one symbolic meaning.

Mumifizierter Papst and Religious Authority

The online collection of the Münchner Stadtmuseum records Mumifizierter Papst (Verzweiflungsmesse Karfreitag) (1998).^*6 The title and image transform Catholic ritual, death, the clerical body, and the authority of belief into grotesque performance. They exaggerate the way clothing, posture, and symbolic objects grant authority to a body, presenting politics and religion as images that someone wears, performs, and displays to others.

Janiszewski’s own body remains outside the frame as he directs posture, clothing, and action for actors and figures. Camera Austria notes the consistency of this position across the work. Decisions about who performs a role, which instant is selected, and how far a body can be treated like an object converge in the author. The viewer encounters the uncanny figure and the location of the directing power that produced it. ^*2

Images recalling the pope, the Passion, Mass, and sacred objects retain fascination with belief, doubt, awe, and bodily death alongside their satire of Catholic institutions. Camera Austria’s description of the book places “faith and doubt” beside “terrifying abysses and melancholy,” naming this ambivalence.^*4 The same frame laughs at authority and records a body attracted to its symbols.

Gender as a Performance of Costume, Posture, and Ritual

Cross-dressing, masks, religious clothing, and nudity expose divisions such as male/female, priest/believer, and ruler/subordinate as roles produced through dress, posture, and ritual. Viewers immediately identify a social position from a few signs, yet the more emphatically the role is performed, the less natural it appears. The visual conventions supporting gender and authority emerge as the source of the image’s strangeness.^*1

Turning Staged Photography toward the Action of “Finding an Image”

Cinematic staged photographs by artists such as Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson use a designed scene to suggest a narrative. Janiszewski repeated actions in private, exposing the film when an absurd relation among body and object existed for an instant. Technical innovation in photography was not his stated aim, and he called the result an “image.” Yet, as Camera Austria records, the closed action could enter public space only as a photograph.^*2 The specificity of the work lies in the coexistence of limited interest in photography as a technical field and the necessity of photography as the sole public form. Viewers receive one instant selected by the artist from the full action; that cut also records his authority over actor or figure.

In individual works, nudity and provocative props can dominate first impressions. Across the decade assembled in Fotoarbeiten 1990–1999, transformation, restraint, altars, masks, and ordinary objects become a repeated vocabulary. Camera Austria sustained this reception through a monograph, exhibitions, editions, and magazine features, presenting a coherent image system built through repetition across many works.^*7 Viewed serially, the method of examining authority and the body continues as it changes from the period of actors to the period of cloth figures.

The Münchner Stadtmuseum situates Janiszewski as a Munich artist who addressed queer identity in the 1990s, describing how models, figures, and props bring contradictory signs of gender into collision. A substantial group of works entered the museum in 2020, and its exhibition history includes Heimsuchungen in 2007.^*8*17*20 Camera Austria’s 2000 exhibition, a pairing with subREAL at Fotogalerie Wien, and records at Basis Wien document the circulation of Fotoarbeiten 1990–1999 as a monograph and exhibition joining the actor period, the interruption, and the cloth-figure period.^*10*18*13

The Open Art Munich catalogue, Autoren Galerie 1, and Photography Now document the retrospective exhibition of the 1990s works as series concerned with religious authority, gender, masks, and cloth figures.^{*12*14*19*15*9} Bibliographic records at the Toledo Museum of Art Library and SFKB confirm the Camera Austria monograph, with twenty-one black-and-white and forty-eight color illustrations, as an independent publication within the documentation of photography.^*11*16