Paul Pfeiffer
«Landscapes»

We see a beach landscape: dazzling light, clouds dispersing. One has to stare a while at what seem like conventional landscape images until, literally, traces of something else, another level, reveals itself: it seems as though someone just ran across the sand. The images are part of the famous portrait series of Marilyn Monroe by the photographer George Barris. Pfeiffer removes all signs of the icon from the pictures. The backdrop of nature formerly the backdrop for the film star, which we fail to recognize without Marilyn Monroe, now dominates as the contents of the image. But Pfeiffer is not only concerned with recording how completely the recognition value of these images is tied to the form of Monroe. He also handles as his theme the idea of the landscape in of itself, the cliché view of the sea, and the role that nature plays in staging a film star, in itself a cliché.