A photograph of a woman, alone in the woods, dressed in feminine garments and just about to take one of them off: What could better inflame men’s imaginings? In the second photograph of a different woman with long hair and a silk dress, one can even glimpse a bare thigh - a naked stomach on a third. Here, as in other photographs, the women are usually completely self-absorbed, just occasionally they appear to feel somewhat ill at ease and peer into the distance or seek eye contact with the viewer – perhaps voyeur? – behind the camera.

This tension, fed of eroticism and a vague feeling of apprehension – the photos are reminiscent of the film Blair Witch Project (1999) – is quite at variance to the title that Gabriele Obermaier bestowed on the series: “Happy are those, far from the madding crowd…” Why should the women be happy? Perhaps because they can be by themselves in the woods and because they are enjoying themselves, changing their clothes here secretly and getting dressed up as if they were going to the theatre or a party. Indeed, as well as stimulating dozens of fantasies (particularly male ones) the situations captured here could also have provided the women involved with a special experience. Freed of everyday constraints they were able to dream themselves into alternative roles, to feel – motivated by the mythical power of the woods – like elves or nymphs or, as proven by some of the photographs, simply to dance with abandon just for once. And they were even allowed to choose the wood they were to be photographed in: They were to have – this was the desire of the artist – a definite emotional relationship to the place of their metamorphosis.

It would be too straightforward to see in Gabriele Obermaier only the photographer of a series. Her project is much more in the tradition of participative art as exemplified by the work of artists such as Yoko Ono, Franz Erhard Walther and Erwin Wurm. In her art she strives to actively include the people who are otherwise, at most, merely passive recipients impressed by the alienation or excesses of art. Either they must follow instructions or become actively creative themselves within allowable limits. Thus, Gabriele Obermaier has the women she has chosen take their favourite outfit into the woods in order to don it in front of the camera after first removing their other clothes. Just the constellation of, on the one hand, having to undress in the somewhat eerie ambience of a wood, often gloomy but sometimes unexpectedly suffused with light, and, on the other, being allowed to wear something that promises a special sense of well-being was so extraordinary that an inimitable experience could emerge from it.

It is only seldom that participative art is photogenic. Often the “setting up” of the experiment decided upon by the artist is only interesting for the active parties. However, Gabriele Obermaier’s photographs are more than a mere documentary of an excursion into the woods. And they offer us more than just material for men’s erotic fantasies. They leave the viewer guessing as to what exactly is being shown, yes, what exactly are the women caught up in? Inherent in them is the germ of many stories: One wonders what happened before and after the picture was taken. Whether the women fell into soliloquies. Whether they ran through the woods or rather tiptoed. How long they stayed there. If childhood memories awoke in them. And how they moved when they wore an elegant dress in a place where all the conventions of elegance were suspended.

Wolfgang Ullrich / Translation: Greta Dunn