”I some­ti­mes won­der what has led us to spend so many hours stu­dy­ing such sce­nes. But of course we both know. What was it Godard said? … ’For us, the future is more real than the present.’”

Robert Adams in a let­ter to Laurenz Berges

I

Landscapes are cul­tu­ral spaces. They are based on the per­cep­tion, inter­pre­ta­tion, and design of man. Irrespective of the occupa­tion with geo­gra­phi­cal areas, whe­ther ori­gi­nal or cul­ti­va­ted nature, or urban environ­ments infra­struc­tu­rally cha­rac­te­ri­sed by archi­tec­ture and trans­port net­works, as cul­tu­ral arte­facts, land­scapes rep­re­sent a spe­cial aspect of our worldly expe­ri­ence. This aspect and the respec­tive artistic and aes­the­tic pecu­lia­ri­ties have made land­scapes recur­ring the­mes in art and in this case also in pho­to­gra­phy. Since the deve­lop­ment of this medium and its various visua­li­sa­tion methods, aspects of the “sub­lime” as a recur­ring theme of nature and land­scape ana­ly­sis emerge on the one hand, while in the history of 20^th cen­tury pho­to­gra­phy, it is often rather the unspec­ta­cu­lar and com­mon­place that shift into the artistic focus on the basis of a factual-documentary visual language.

The colour-photographic series Cloppenburg from the early work of Laurenz Berges, pre­sen­ted in this publi­ca­tion, can be con­side­red an example of this. It was crea­ted in 1989/90 in the artist’s home­town of Lower Saxony, Germany fol­lo­wing a one-year stay in New York. The artist has been living in Dusseldorf for more than 25 years now but is still has per­so­nal and family con­nec­tions to Cloppenburg.

In the con­text of the inter­na­tio­nal con­tem­porary artistic pho­to­gra­phy, Laurenz Berges has pre­do­mi­nantly gai­ned renown for his muted colour pic­ture sta­ges of inte­rior details of aban­do­ned rooms and depo­pu­la­ted pla­ces, which oscil­late bet­ween abstrac­tion and redu­ced nar­ra­tive moments. These include the series Kasernen, crea­ted in the 1990s, in which he tur­ned his atten­tion to aban­do­ned Russian army bar­racks in East Germany fol­lo­wing reuni­fi­ca­tion as a pic­to­rial theme, as well as the series Etzweiler showing inte­ri­ors of aban­do­ned vil­la­ges in the lignite mining area around Duren, and later motifs crea­ted in Duisburg and the Ruhr val­ley. If one con­siders the fun­da­men­tal aspects of tran­si­ence and abstract image details in these later series of works, it is evi­dent that these cha­rac­te­ristics are alre­ady pre­sent in cer­tain motifs of the Cloppenburg series.

II

Even before stu­dy­ing pho­to­gra­phy, first in Essen and later with under Bernd Becher in Dusseldorf, Laurenz Berges had alre­ady dealt with the deve­lop­ment and tra­di­tion of 20^th cen­tury land­scape and docu­men­tary pho­to­gra­phy and its cen­tral rep­re­sen­ta­ti­ves in the field of black and white pho­to­gra­phy, such as Walker Evans or Robert Frank in America, or Albert Renger-Patzsch and Heinrich Riebesehl in Germany, as well as the deve­lop­ment and impact of American New Color Photography. During the 1970s, Stephen Shore, among others, per­tai­ned to the pho­to­graph­ers who, ori­en­ta­ting towards ever­y­day American land­scapes and socio­lo­gi­cally refe­ren­tial the­mes, con­cep­tually devo­ted him­self to colour pho­to­gra­phy and who influ­enced deve­lop­ments also in German photography.

In addi­tion to Bernd and Hilla Becher – who, just as many of the American pho­to­graph­ers named above, par­ti­ci­pa­ted in the legen­dary exhi­bi­tion New Topographics. Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape in Rochester in 1975/76 and who main­tai­ned close con­tact with, say, Stephen Shore – it was first and fore­most Michael Schmidt who invi­ted Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore or Robert Adams to lec­tures at his ‘Workshop for Photography’ in Berlin-Kreuzberg, Germany, thus enab­ling encoun­ters for Laurenz Berges, among others. [1] Later, Laurenz Berges also cul­ti­va­ted a long-standing per­so­nal exch­ange with some of them, such as Robert Adams, in the con­text of and fol­lo­wing a group exhi­bi­tion cura­ted by Thomas Weski and Heinz Liesbrock in 2002, in which both artists par­ti­ci­pa­ted alongs­ide Joachim Brohm, Bernhard Fuchs and Simone Nieweg. [1]

This exhi­bi­tion also addres­sed land­scapes chan­ged by man in urban peri­pheral and sett­le­ment areas. Aspects that are indi­vi­dually applied to a typi­cal German land­scape in Laurenz Berges’ series Cloppenburg and hence­forth become comprehensible..

III

Cloppenburg can be con­side­red exem­plary for many district towns and small towns, vil­la­ges and loca­li­ties in Lower Saxony. The district town, which has grown over several cen­tu­ries in terms of cul­tu­ral history, blends into a flat environ­ment of for­mer moor­land and heath­land cha­rac­te­ri­sed by fields, forests, agri­cul­ture, and livestock bree­ding. Reddish-brown, some­ti­mes whi­te­wa­s­hed brick buil­dings cha­rac­te­rise its resi­den­tial and func­tio­nal archi­tec­ture, and unlike the mostly Protestant towns in Lower Saxony, a Roman Catholic popu­la­tion is pre­do­mi­nant in Cloppenburg. A pecu­lia­rity that can be ascer­tai­ned as an aspect of socia­li­sa­tion in cer­tain parts of the environ­ment and thus also in a few pic­tures of the series by Laurenz Berges.

Concentrating on mostly unpo­pu­la­ted image details that nevert­he­l­ess refer to the human being and the man-made environ­ment, archi­tec­ture, eco­no­mic and traffic-related infra­struc­tures, the 52 indi­vi­dual images in the series com­bine to form a redu­ced nar­ra­tive land­scape tableau with a muted colour scheme. The iso­la­ted per­sons appearing in some of the pic­tures seem almost humo­rous, some­what remi­nis­cent of film extras, and rather unusual for the rest of the series as well as the later works of Laurenz Berges. As a blur­red figure in a car, taken anony­mously from the back on a side­walk or in a ceme­tery, they become rep­re­sen­ta­ti­ves revea­ling a nar­ra­tive refe­rence by the artist to the inha­bi­tants and their lives in Cloppenburg, obser­ved from a dis­tance. Tongues in cheek, even cars par­ked in iso­la­ted pla­ces refer to them, now and then.

The images, taken in the given light con­di­ti­ons by day or night in autumn and win­ter with a docu­men­tary visual lan­guage, do not focus on the cultural-historically note­wor­thy indi­vi­dual, which Cloppenburg could also offer, but rather on an approach to a land­scape pic­ture in which the unspec­ta­cu­lar deve­lops its own expres­siv­en­ess and, with the pho­to­gra­phic per­spec­tives and details cho­sen by Laurenz Berges, a con­cen­tra­ted pic­to­ria­lity. Recurrently, streets and paths divide the pic­to­rial spaces with their details of fields, trees, and hou­ses, direc­ting the gaze into hori­zon­tal, ver­ti­cal, and dia­go­nal axes in order to open up per­spec­tives onto pic­to­rial hori­zons accor­ding to the clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion of land­scape images. In fur­ther images, they gra­duate and add rhythm to the pic­to­rial space from a close-up view in inter­ac­tion with archi­tec­ture, “strips” of fields, adjoi­ning mea­dows, or ver­ti­cally ori­en­ted views through trees. In addi­tion, rows of gara­ges, remi­nis­cent of colour field pain­tings, or warehou­ses whose dif­fe­rent geo­me­tric forms span the pic­to­rial space and stand out strikin­gly from their sur­roun­dings, appear as abstract aes­the­tic moments in the sequence of images. Different typo­gra­phies of com­pany let­te­rings aes­the­ti­cally situate their foun­da­tion in various time con­texts, for which some pic­tures with shop win­dow deco­ra­ti­ons, a stage-like gra­dua­ted inte­rior with gra­phi­cally striking, floral-ornamental wall­pa­per from – so it seems – the 1970s or the motif with a deco­ra­tive mural with fish, are exemplary.

In the con­text of the history of pho­to­gra­phy, the shop win­dow pic­tures also recall, among other things, the famous pho­to­graphs of Parisian shop win­dows by Eugène Atget from the early 20^th cen­tury. With his con­cep­tually per­cei­ved typo­lo­gi­cal images, it was his inten­tion to pho­to­gra­phi­cally cap­ture a vanis­hing, aes­the­ti­cally uni­que momen­tum in the incre­a­sin­gly urba­nised Paris of the future.

To cap­ture the pre­sent from an awa­ren­ess of future chan­ges, to docu­ment time and its nar­ra­tive tra­ces in images, is a fac­tor typi­cal of pho­to­gra­phy. In the case of the Cloppenburg series, this can be dis­cer­ned in a variety of con­cen­tra­ted pic­to­rial com­po­si­ti­ons; for Laurenz Berges, this is an essen­tial motive for the crea­tion of the series. [1]

Following dif­fe­rent shoo­ting prin­ci­ples and trans­fer­ring the fac­tual and tem­po­ral varia­bles into images with indi­vi­dual details, the unspec­ta­cu­lar motifs from Cloppenburg appear as a land­scape tableau rela­ting to one ano­ther, in which, with a pre­mo­ni­tion of the future, uni­ver­sal vali­dity and recur­ring events deve­lop a charm of their own.

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