Anamorphosis

The Städl in Frankfurt currently has an interesting exhibition by William Kentridge entitled “What Will Come (Has Already Come)”. Kentridge is a South African artist, born in 1955 in Johannesburg who experiments with anamorphosis in his drawings.

Anamorphosis is a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. In the case of Kentridge: his drawings can be reconstituted by using a cylindrical mirror in the middle of the drawings. The heart of the exhibition is an anamorphic film (about 9 min long), which uses Kentridge’s drawings being viewed in a darkened room, by means of a cylindrical mirror to decipher the drawings, accompanied by Beethoven, African music and Italian ambient sounds. I found the exhibition quite fascinating, especially the references to earlier attempts by Italian Renaissance painters and Albrecht Dürer at anamorphosis.

I was wondering whether anyone has attempted to create anamorphic photographs (this might be possible with the use of Photoshop)… creating photographs which only become legible by using some kind of device…