Marianne Mueller’s approach to photography is unusual. Unlike the majority of prominent (particularly German) photographers working today, whose work is founded on technical perfection and meticulous composition, Mueller’s philosophy is based on ceding control and responding intuitively to her surroundings. Indeed she is less interested in ideas and theories than in pursuing a way of looking at the world that is primarily emotional and spontaneous.

Mueller’s stance is obsessively democratic, for she makes no hierarchical distinction between her subjects, recording on analogue camera as much as she possibly can in the course of her day. Like a highly sensitive divining rod, Mueller frequently photographs objects and scenes without attempting to understand or relate to them. She likens her approach to being in a junk shop where, amongst the plethora of visual impressions, certain things leap out and demand attention. The artist’s description of how this process works demonstrates the extent to which she experiences the world as acutely physical. She talks, for example, of how a chair transfixes her gaze almost as though it is looking at her, seducing her into acknowledging it through the camera shutter, the chair and the camera interacting independently of her movements. Not only does Mueller see the world through her lens, she also seeks to be touched by the experience, like a filter for the lived life that she witnesses and records. Reacting to what already exists, her work is a homage to reality rather than an attempt to explain or comment on it.

Shunning the spectacular and the aesthetically pleasing, Mueller’s aim is to capture the irrelevant moment, the intimate banality of the everyday. The artist’s images consist of bad lighting, haggard and tired people, beaten-up furniture and run-down buildings. Her work has nothing in common with Nan Goldin’s voyeuristic glimpses into underground scenes but certain similarities with Wolfgang Tillmans’s engagement with the poignant beauty of everyday objects and the fragility of human life. Like Tillmans, Mueller’s individual images as well as their combination in book or exhibition form produce what he terms an ‘abstraction grounded in the real world’. Her desire to form connections and correspondences between seemingly disparate and unrelated images is ultimately a method of creating meaning, of making sense of the messiness of life without levelling it out or removing the edginess.

The process of collecting, assessing and ordering the photographs is as important as shooting them to Mueller. Every photograph she takes is developed as a small print and archived chronologically, one film per envelope. Each of her exhibitions and books is a rearrangement of material from this growing archive. She has, for example, made around twenty-five different editions since 1995 of selected photographs which she mounts between glass and stores in grey cardboard boxes. Just as most real-life narratives are not linear, so the artist arranges combinations of images, drawn from different places, environments and aspects of her life, in such a way that the sources are not obvious. Without it ever being completely tangible, a visceral relationship between, for example, body parts, details of furniture, architectural elements or a tree gradually emerges. Mueller’s process, having begun intuitively with the spontaneous camera shots, thus becomes increasingly disciplined up to the point at which she meticulously plans a project with the aid of models and plans. Remarkably, whatever the context, Marianne Mueller captures the raw essence of a moment whilst showing us its place in the larger scheme of things.