German photographer Lotte Reimann mined the Internet’s photo sharing sites to innovate her latest project, and book, Jaunt. Hitting the jackpot when she stumbled across a collection of nude self-portraits from an elderly amateur photographer couple’s archive, she contrasted them with fast cars and desert landscapes for one helluva racy road trip. “The images are half authentic, half fictional, and very personal. From a picture archive of an amateur photographer couple, I ended up showing my own fantasies by mingling their images with pictures from other ‘random’ sources on the Internet,” explains Reimann. “It’s a photographic 'jaunt' through lust in age, that is neither linked to a specifically feminine or masculine desire, but to eroticism as an interpersonal phenomenon.”
The couple’s original photography combines testicals with handbreaks, and biceps with watering cans. “There was an openness and warmth combined with something rough and raw in their imagery that just pushed the right button. I quickly realised that it could be told more powerfully, if dealt freer with the material,” Reimann reveals. Taking close up shots of her computer screen – using the monitor’s grid lines to symbolise the external gaze – she rewrote the couple's story with inspiration from J. G. Ballard’s post-modern, car-crash-cum-fetish novel Crash. “For me, personally, it's not just the crash I relate to sexuality, but the car itself. Metal, steel, glass, leather, plastic, oil, and dirt – all agglomerated into one piece, which encloses me – blasting with tremendous speed through the landscape, is hugely exciting, arousing.”
Jaunt is out now, available from Art Paper Editions
