Caspar David Friedrich through a Broken Windscreen: Arnold Odermatt’s Peaceful Crash Scenes

Ricarda Vidal

Origin: Static Issue 07
Content: Text/images

This essay focuses on a series of black and white photographs of car crashes taken between the 1950s and ‘70s by Arnold Odermatt, retired police photographer and former Head of the Swiss traffic police. The photographs are part of a collection of images Odermatt took for his private pleasure rather than as part of his police work. Since the early 1990s they have been on show in Europe and the USA in a number of solo and group exhibitions. Both highly formalistic and deeply personal they have been compared to Romantic landscape painting more than once. Taking this comparison further the essay suggests that Odermatt’s car wrecks can be seen as a contemporary version of Romantic ruin painting. By juxtaposing Odermatt’s images to the works of Caspar David Friedrich, whose paintings emanate a similar atmosphere of solemn introspection, harmony and quiet dignity, it explores how the Romantic concept of the ruin is continued and redefined in the black and white images.

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Contributor:

Dr Ricarda Vidal is based at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London. Her PhD (London Consortium, 2006) was on the obsession with speed and the fascination with the car and its crash in 20th-century Western culture. Her articles explore the legacy of Modernism and Romanticism, speed, the car and driving as cultural phenomena. Her current research focuses on the nostalgia for Modernism that pervades contemporary urban architecture and urban culture in the Western hemisphere. Concentrating on cultural production since the 1990s, she is looking at urban writing, photography, shortfilms and artist videos.

Apart from her academic work, she is also director of Betting on Shorts, a London-based cultural organisation specialising in shortfilm and artist video. (www.bettingonshorts.com ).