The first time I saw Miriam Cahn’s photographs was in her exhibition at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff in 2009. At the time, I was entering the world of an artist I barely knew, and I was surprised to discover photographs from a ‘painter’. It was only later that I began to make a connection between the photos and the other works. The portrait photographs reminded me of Miriam’s small-scale paintings, with gazes that were so present, as if hypnotised or hypnotising. In compiling the gallery’s inventory, I discovered that the subjects of these photos varied enormously: portraits/faces, animals, architecture, bodily forms from her sculptures or her own paintings and drawings… The media differed too: the old photos in some of the catalogues were analogue, while the more recent photos were inkjet prints made in the artist’s studio using an office printer. Some of these photos are presented in her work without any further intervention, while Miriam has drawn directly on others with graphite or coloured pencil, making it almost impossible to guess at the original image. It’s the new texture of the paper that interests her. To fully understand these differences, I have had several discussions with Miriam over the years. She has kept all her cameras despite their obsolescence.

Cahn first started experimenting with analogue photography in the late 1970s. Using a Canon Reflex camera, she immortalised the ‘street’ drawings she made in Basel and in the Alma tunnel in Paris. These photos are the only remaining traces of these drawings, both work and document, testimony and memory of a gesture in the public space. Cahn went on to take photographs of the people she saw, but very quickly felt uncomfortable with this approach. It was almost too intimate for the artist, so she chose to photograph ‘people on TV’ to capture their expressions. In her drawings she uses the title Was Mich Anschaut, which means ‘what is looking at me’, expressing the intensity of a look that can sometimes be intrusive.

By the 1990s, Miriam, who usually worked in black and white, started to show an interest in colour. The artist took up residence in a studio in the Engadine region, near St Moritz. Long daily walks, accompanied by a Rollei camera, became a new source of themes drawn from everyday life: one of her first workshops in Engadine, a goat, flowers, landscapes, her paintings or drawings, all added to this collection of images, like a library, constitutes an elliptical narrative of the artist’s travels. We are never quite sure where these photos were taken. Her gaze is as interested in the architecture of the cities where she exhibits as in historical or anonymous people. Many photos were taken in Sarajevo in the 1990s while the artist was staying there for a show at the Obala Center. It is also at this time that Miriam Cahn began to create ‘clusters’, mixed ensembles in which she integrated her photographs in dialogue with paintings and drawings.

An artist of her time, Cahn quickly became interested in new techniques with the advent of digital photography. She first used a Canon Ixus before replacing it with an iPhone or iPad, and the photos were printed on her office inkjet printer, incorpor- ating an element of chance and randomness. She likes to print with ‘whatever ink is left’ in the printer. The result is sometimes disorientating: lines are superimposed on the image when the ink runs out, while on others the contrast of colours is striking, almost unreal. The photograph therefore echoes the artist’s own drawings, in which she uses coloured pencil and unexpected shades of colour: in one of her photographs, the face, printed in black and white, is enhanced by a crimson red colour. This face, at first glance seductive and with fine features, disturbs with the red of the lips. Cahn’s reading of Hannah Arendt led her to reconsider the idea of beauty, a subjective concept, which does not reflect on the inner personality, as in her portrait of Alois Brunner.

The way of looking at the subject also changes between analogue and digital: where analogue requires adjustments, a viewpoint, precise lighting, and has a limit of 36 shots owing to the length of the roll of film, digital becomes a snapshot, a recording of the moment, a more spontaneous way of looking around. This accelerated relationship with time gives greater freedom to the artist, who can take more photos since she can see the ‘result’ straight away. Miriam doesn’t rework her digital photos on the computer, doesn’t try to make them more beautiful or correct details. These are ‘raw’ photographs that capture a moment in time.

Her photography was later set in motion in 2013 when the artist produced her first series of slides based on photographs of sculptures and/or her own body, which are destined to change or even disappear in favour of the sculptures. Gradually, she also began to integrate the variations that exist in her own work with the series Serielle denken, or ‘serial thinking’, a term that echoes the Renaissance, the period when the notion of the series first appeared. In this latest series of slides, Cahn reveals for the first time the successive transformations that some of her paintings and drawings can undergo.