Against Time
Baró Galeria
Erwin Olaf
May - June 2026
“What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once.”
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
When we look at a flower, we know that its beauty is inseparable from its transience. Its form is destined to change, and to do so within a short span of time. Disappearance is part of life, of all life. There is something profoundly beautiful, and at the same time tragic, in that single certainty.
In this sense, photography plays a fundamental role as a practice that embalms time, remaining tied to a referent that is already disappearing at the very moment the image is taken. As Barthes described it: “the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, radiations have issued which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is of no importance: the photograph of the being which has disappeared comes to touch me like the delayed rays of a star.” [1]
Photographing a flower, therefore, is not an innocent gesture. Least of all when it is done with the level of attention, precision, and sensitivity with which Erwin Olaf approached still life throughout much of his life. One of the most singular voices in contemporary photography, his work has undergone significant reassessment following his passing, including the recent presentation at the Stedelijk Museum.
On this occasion, and within the context of the Mallorca PhotoFest, Baró Galeria proposes a more intimate view of his practice: a kind of close-up that focuses exclusively on still life. The exhibition Against Time brings together a series of small-format photographs of flowers, produced between 2006 and 2021. In these images, the flowers emerge from vases that shimmer and merge with their surroundings, while their stems and petals are insistently outlined against neutral, and at times geometric, backgrounds. They appear suspended and weightless, frozen in a moment of their becoming.
Through a sustained gaze, Olaf returns again and again to the same motif, insisting upon it and observing its subtle variations. Perhaps repetition is not redundancy, but a form of attention. In this gesture, the exhibition ultimately becomes a quiet meditation on time and its resistance.
[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 80–81.