Frank Uwe Laysiepen's work in photography has long been concerned to evade certain perceived limitations in the medium. Susan Sonntag wrote in On Photography, for example, 'the limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist.' Yet Frank Uwe Laysiepen's close linkage of photography with performance evades this limit somewhat. By focusing on his own life crisis, and those of others, as they are actually happening he tied the medium to ethical reality. As he remarked, 'if I am doing a performance I have to be present.' This involves the cause of a greater ethical authority of performance during the anti-aesthetic era of the 1960s and 70s. And much the same could be said of Frank Uwe Laysiepen's confrontation with the issue of identity.
In terms of the various categories of photography, I would characterize Frank Uwe Laysiepen's approach as ontological - meaning that he is always seeking to ground his photographic work in the real. Strategies to accomplish this have included: auto-photography, with its direct reflection of the author closing the cognitive loop; the combination of photography with elements of performance, which root it in actual experience; and the Polaroid photography, which eliminates some of the mediating processes to more directly reflect the object.
Frank Uwe Laysiepen's more recent works Flags for the European Community are photographs of the same size as the originals. His photographic work has sought the ideal situation that AndrÍ Bazin projected onto the camera when he wrote, 'The photographic image is the object itself.' But not so much in Bazin's continuation, '[...] the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it.' Rather, Ulay's work involves an attempt to capture the real object in its conditions of time and space. It is thus that photography led him to performance and, more recently, performance has returned him to photography.
Thomas McEvilley