The master manipulator

Now that everyone's a photographer, what's a photographer to do? In Florian Maier-Aichen's case, he looks back into the past and forward at new technical processes. Then he combines the two. He plays with images so that you're not sure if what you're seeing actually exists. Sometimes, experimenting with old film means there are mistakes. He likes that. That's when a use-by date, having expired, creates imperfect works in the present.

He's influenced by history - the history of photography, the history of his country, the history of photography in his country, which is Germany. Even though Los Angeles, where he lives for part of the year, has been the most important geographical space in his life (it freed him from Europe), you'd probably be able to guess, at least from some of the landscapes in his current show at Gagosian Gallery, that he's German. Guesswork is required because of the 15 works on display, 11 are titled Untitled.

This sort of non-labelling can make a note-jotting journalist's, never mind a viewer's, heart sink. Despite his flaws, Damien Hirst - a former Gagosian stablemate - at least has a way with beefy captions you can chew over, such as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Maier-Aichen, who's 40, clad in shorts, low-key, with wide-spaced eyes and a slight dreaminess that's more than simple jet lag, definitely isn't Hirst.

Why the lack of titles? "Because I think everything is in the picture," he says simply. But he must have a way of distinguishing one from another in his head. "We give them nicknames. This one [an abstract swirl of loops] I call Rollercoaster. But my wife nicknames it Dog."

You wouldn't automatically assume that either Rollercoaster/ Dog or another Untitled ("I think the nickname for this is Splash"), with its explosion of paint, is a photograph. "It's like animation," says Maier-Aichen, a fan of Chuck Jones, who directed many Looney Tunes cartoons. "I do scribbling, fill in with acrylic and then photograph it. By default of that process, the end result is a photo."

Sometimes, his work is highly technical, with overlapping use of exposures and complicated tweakings; sometimes he wants to be what he calls "anti-scientific", as he was when he created the huge, untitled starscape (nickname: Big Sur Stars) at the entrance to the gallery. "Most starscapes are photographed as a scientific project. But I had a desire to paint a watercolour. The background was photographed, the foreground was drawn in, then it was photographed to be honest to the process."

It's not a real constellation, however. "I hate reality! I didn't even look at real stars; they're scratches or scribbles." Like the cartoon bubbles which float out over the Ennis House (designed in 1923 by Frank Lloyd Wright, which Maier-Aichen photographed in 2011) in Los Angeles, they're a sly insertion of the particular that makes you look more closely at the whole.