"Reisebilder/Standbilder"

gelatin silver print on baryta

signed, dated, and numbered on verso

The trigger for the image pairs of the series Standbilder ("stills") is the existence of an image from 1971. "In a certain sense", says Bechtold, "it is a kind of simulacrum of the police radar image: the image stimulus here also lies in the past, in something that has happened". However, the image trigger of this twin of the series Reisebilder (travel images) is activated by the subjective determination of time and the objective influence of time, so here too the image is triggered by something other than a motif stimulus, an image will or a staging concept. However, the triggers of the Reisebilder of that time could never be those of the stills of 2001. Those were paraphrases of tourist photos, willful fakes of some country, wanton arbitrariness between the designated and the designation, in other words simply a critical reflection of the medium, without even knowing about the Standbilder they later triggered.
The images from 2001 are again fakes, refer to fakes, refer to 1971, recreate these images. They are therefore halfway objective with regard to the images of 1971, minus, according to Bechtold, "what time has already washed out of these images". Which, of course, increases the degree of objectivity again. It turns out that the series of the Standbilder depicts two things. On the one hand, a closed circle insofar as they are photographs that inversely refer to photographs, and on the other, an imagined irreversible arrow of time that only creates the fact of a certain period of time by marking a certain period of time.
(Sylvia Taraba in: Gottfried Bechtold. Reine und gemischte Zustände, Kunsthaus Bregenz 2006, p. 79, transl. by deepl.com)