Matthias Heiderich, from Snow Blind series

Matthias Heiderich (great name!) is a 31 year old self-taught photographer who specializes in ultra clean, geometrically perfect photographs of Berlin architecture. He is certainly in the line of Germanic structuralist/minimalists who go all the way back to the 1920s. His website shows a large body of consistent work in this style.

Something notable about this artist is how he puts his work in the public arena. His website has links to a series of online galleries who sell editioned pigment prints of his photographs. Carte Blanche gallery in San Francisco sells his prints for as little as $99, although other galleries have them for much more.

This is a recent development in the marketing of photographic art prints. The combination of calibrated computer/printer gives a new twist to the reproducability of photography, intrinsic to the medium since Fox Talbot’s negative/positive process announced in 1839. High quality archival prints, identical to the original artist’s proof, can be be printed with much greater ease and control than were earlier darkroom prints by artist-photographers.

You may think that at least a darkroom print was hand-made and therefore imbued with the artist’s ‘aura’, but in many cases they were made by darkroom technicians. Cartier-Bresson prints can sell for tens of thousands of dollars, but he gave up darkroom work in the 1930s!

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