While ordering his affairs in anticipation of his pending death, Jürgen Baldiga decided to be cremated. He asked Aron Neubert to photographically record the cremation - the ultimate image of the visible disintegration of his body, that subject of countless self-portraits which Jürgen had already shot. In promising to take this picture, Aron counterdemanded that they meet for a photograph each month that Jürgen still lived. Out of these meetings a series would be created, a series which would have found its terminus in the image taken at the crematorium.
The photographs presented here came about as the result of this pact between friends, reminiscent of a pact with the devil. Behind the camera, Jürgen's curiosity was directed to every permutation of exhibitionism. He investigated the search - at times introverted, at times extroverted - for a self-image of his models. In presenting himself as an object before Aron's camera, the project was defined by a fascination with the complete disappearance of his own image: the wish of an inverted Narcissus. Rather than pining to unite with his own reflection in the water (as in the myth), Baldiga looked forward - already one with his own image - to its destruction in fire.
It would be wrong to understand this celebration of transistoriness only as a kind of longing for death. First and foremost it is a form of repressing the fact of his death, combarable to the ardor with which Jürgen prepared for the celebration of his own funeral. He engaged a speaker for the funeral, and, just ten days before his death, recorded the music for it on a cassette. Dying itself would not be abandoned to chance. Together with friends on his last evening he toasted the resolve to make an end of it, given the physical impossibility of living according to his own standards.

The portraits Aron Neubert took succeed in illustrating both the conception of the person Jürgen Baldiga actualized, as well as the fractures in his selfstylizitation. Familiarity and intimacy banish voyerism. In a succession of posed shots and snapshots, the photographs represent life's various roles, among them such integral components as the consequences of AIDS - sickness, hospital stays, and medical treatments. The bed as context frequently appears as beautiful drapery as well as a place of illness and of intimate companionship. Thought the cronology of the pictures and the passage of time can be noted in Jürgen's weight loss, the portraits indicate no fall into decay. IV equipment, endoscopy, catheters, nausea, aßnd thoughts of death are shown as patterns of normal life - thought a restricted one - just as self-love, love, eating ice cream, drugs, career, political activity, or gay life are. Facets of life are expaned here - equivalent and exchangeable in their sequence.
As in the literary model of devil's pact, where ultimately both parties must lose (in the framework of the Christian imagination, a third party, the divine power, must pervail), the portrait series never reaches the agreed upon conclusion. No one had reckoned with the legal obstacles of taking a picture in front of the crematory oven. (The godly third is replaced by bureaucracy.) The last photo Jürgen Baldiga wanted was never made. In its place stands a picture of the deceased in his bed. The problem of wresting a likeness out of life - more important to Aron than that transistoriness with which Jürgen was concerned - is turned around precisely in this image. The picture - taken by itself - offers no proof that Jürgen Baldiga isn't simply sleeping.

Ulmann-Matthias Hakert