​[Photographs: Gelatin silver print /barite, diasec, 150x105 cm, 5+1AP; Gelatin silver print/barite, diasec, 100x70 cm, 10+1AP; gelatin silver print/barite, 41x30 cm, 5+1AP; Gicleé Fine Art Print on Barite Satin, 33 x 48.5 cm, 5+1AP]

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A discourse on the factors of perception, time and reality in photography, using contemporary and historical images on glass plate negatives. Beaches and dunes of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as scenes of the Second World War and the landing of allied troops.

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excerpt from "Models of intensive time perception" from Dr. Til JulianHuss, in Trommeter-Szabó 2004-2015

"The photographs in the Cuxhaven - Saipan series from 2013 and 2014 are reenactments of old photographs from the first half of the 20th century, whose glass plate negatives they bought from the archive of a former postcard publisher. (...) The artists have for this purpose they went to the coasts of Cuxhaven and Saipan, those places where the purchased negatives and historical sites of the Second World War were located, and made glass plate negatives using a similar, very complex recording process.In exhibitions (...) they presented the exposures of the old purchased and of the new self-made negatives side by side without distinguishing between the year of origin. Through the perfection of technical imitation and appropriation of motifs, past and present are leveled on a single time level."

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excerpt from "Thoughts on temporality and reality in Trommeter-Szabó's photographs" of Dr. Irene Mertens, in Cuxhaven Saipan (2014)

"Trommeter-Szabó describe the Cuxhaven-Saipan series as an "analysis of the factors of time and reality" in photography. Time in photography is the time of recording (shutter speed of the lens, i.e. exposure time) and the moment of release/recording (Time, day, year). But also the moment of viewing, the fully developed/exposed photograph, the moment of publication. (...)

"As a medium, photography is thus capable of weaving together presence and absence, present and past.“ (Margaret Iversen; What is a Photograph?, in Paradigma Photography, 2002). Possibly therein lies the

the inherent magic of photography. But narrated time can also be manipulated by changing the contextualization, for example by choosing the titling and creating a new timeline/story by assembling it into a series. (...)

If one realizes that photographs of the series Cuxhaven & Saipan are also implemented in large final formats, the content-related work on the interlocking of reality and time receives another avant-garde reference: the blow-up (e.g. see Antonioni's film of the same name) merely lets the viewer bounce off the surface of the photographic paper. Again, in the greatly enlarged photo - with visible grain - there are no references to the real time and place.

(...) "Each photographed object is just the trace left by the disappearance of everything else. This is an almost perfect crime, an almost complete dissolution of the world, which only emits the illusion of this or that object, of which the picture then becomes an incomprehensible enigma. Based on this radical exception, you have an incomparable view of the world. It's not about producing. It's all in the art of disappearing.(Jean Baudrillard; For illusion does not contradict reality, 1998).