Dagmar Keller
Characters (Übertragungen)
3D animation on two screens, 2:30 min. (loop), 2024

Dagmar Keller’s body of works ‘Characters’ reflects on the genre of portrait photography and questions the promise of photography to depict reality. The most recent piece in this series, the 3D animation ‘Characters (Übertragungen)’, explores the role of the photographer in portrait photography and, rather than capturing a single moment, emphasizes the process of ‘becoming a picture’.

“We live in the face of the other, not in our own, we don’t see that,” writes the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård. In Keller`s view, both reading and creating portraits are deeply connected to this kind of transfer that Karl Ove Knausgård describes. In the 3D animation ‘Characters (Übertragungen)’, Keller has also carried out a ‘transfer’ in the most literal sense: she posed in front of a camera and transferred the recorded motion-capture data onto her 3D avatars. Thus, in ‘Characters (Übertragungen), we seemingly witness a portrait session with avatars in the studio, attributing various emotions to them.