The feedstock of my current series "BACTERIALITY" consists of slides and colour negatives that i took myself or collected at the bulky waste or bought from private esates. The oldest ones are about seventy years old and some pass a process of disintegration because of bad storage conditions. I push this process by planting bacteria cultures on them. The results are manifold: the slides change very differently according to the age and the development of the chemical emulsion and the diverse bacteria. The bacteria eat themselves into the photo emusion, bring out all the hidden colors and rearrange these. This effekt of the bacteria cultures becomes means of expression in form and content. On the one hand photography is unmasked as illusion on the other a new reality is created.

After drying the condition of the treated material is stable enough to take up to 1000 individual detail pictures with a microscope. Then I stitch them back together on the computer. With this technique i can realize prints in high quality at any size. Rightnow I print them up to 162 x 260cm on fotopaper with lightfast pigmentdyes. The prints are mounted with a acidfree adhisive foil on wood and covered with poured lightfast resins.

- Wolfgang Ganter