DREAM MATERIAL
text by Paulius Petraitis

Photography, even art photography, often announces itself as part of the world. It is allied with certain thisness, with a link to reality which Roland Barthes termed “this-has-been“. If photography’s political and cultural ally is visibility, Paul Herbst’s series Dream Material, fittingly for the title, deals with the darker, subconscious side of our being. Rather than attempting to offer a piece of the world, Herbst’s photographs make no claim to represent visual reality. Instead, they go deeper. The images are created in a way that mimics our unconscious, hidden desires and are strung together like a dream: centering and revolving around highly-charged symbols rather than temporality. Despite plenty of references – from W. Tillmans and L. Clark to Blue star tattoo and Predator – revolving around like boomerang that is recurrent motive in the series, one doesn’t have to decode everything. As Freud remarked, sometimes even in a dream a cigar is just a cigar.