Having been a large scale minimalist painter in college and subsequent years after, I was immediatey drawn to Stephen Heyne’s photographic interpretations and explorations of that line between painting and photography. Stefan’s new book, titled The Noise, is full of museum quality minimalist imagery–and like his painter predecessors, the work is elegant and powerful.

Berlin-based, Stefan’s images are large scale and expensive, garnering the same prices as paintings. His photographs are void of description, don’t reflect a specific reality, and “are characterised by a vigilant manipulation of the obscured detailing of the objects and spaces shown. The allure of his prints lies in the magical spectrum of their colours, their velvety surfaces and their quality as objects.”

Christopher Tanert writes:
He has made it his task to seek possibilities to give visibility to the perception of space and to let visual spaces arise through the composition of situations of light and surfaces. He counters the recent “bonjour tristesse” in the sense of subjective interpretation of the world by blurring motif and object and rejecting the expectation that the motif could contain concealed meanings.

Heyne uses the lens of his CANON 10D reflex camera to adjust “unfocuses”. The only digital retouching he undertakes is to “spot” the pictures. He does entirely without pictorial supplementations and interventions. When he eliminates color from the picture, then only for the sake of reversing or clarifying from positive to negative image.