Laurenz Berges’s pho­to­graphs exem­pli­fy noti­ons of memo­ry and place, the »that-has-been« about which Roland Barthes spo­ke so elo­quent­ly in his semi­nal text on pho­to­gra­phy, Camera Lucida (1980), as well as the main­stays that account for our con­tin­ued fasci­na­ti­on with the pho­to­gra­phic medi­um at a time when it is being threa­ten­ed by new digi­tal tech­no­lo­gies. Upon initi­al vie­w­ing, the images in Berges’s cur­rent pro­ject qua­li­fy more accu­ra­te­ly as non-places, the kind of non-descript, gene­ric loca­les that each of us has expe­ri­en­ced — in the mun­da­ne­n­ess of our ever­y­day lives, in the stills we extra­ct from films, in the fur­ther rea­ches of our sub­con­scious — and that remain ever pre­sent, rea­dy to call up from our visu­al memo­ry banks at a moment’s noti­ce. That Berges has pre­ser­ved a few such places from his imme­dia­te envi­rons in Düsseldorf and North Rhine-Westphalia in crisp, accu­ra­te color images that seem vague­ly fami­li­ar even to the view­er who has never actual­ly tra­ver­sed the­se sites unders­cores the uni­ver­sa­li­ty of pho­to­gra­phic depic­tion on the one hand and, on the other, the sub­jec­ti­vi­ty of viewing.

Several images in the series record the inter­sec­tion of archi­tec­tu­ral ele­ments with the ground in har­mo­nious if unspec­ta­cu­lar com­po­si­ti­ons, pregnant with the impli­ca­ti­on of what might have occur­red or still could occur the­re. In others, archi­tec­tu­ral ele­ments enter into timid com­pe­ti­ti­on with natu­re, the sepa­ra­ti­on of the two realms sym­bo­li­zing the psy­chi­cal com­part­ment­a­liza­ti­on of expe­ri­ence in gene­ral. Like Berges’s ear­lier stu­dies of Russian bar­racks, the­se images deri­ve their impact from inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions; whe­re a qua­li­ty of quiet per­ma­nence suf­fu­ses the aban­do­ned inte­ri­ors of the ear­lier series (initi­al­ly con­s­truc­ted for occu­pa­ti­on by German tro­ops during the Wilhelminian and Nazi peri­ods, the bar­racks then housed Russian tro­ops, which, sin­ce the fall of the Wall, the reuni­fi­ca­ti­on of Germany and end of the Cold war, have remain­ed unoc­cu­p­ied), the pho­to­graphs in this series demons­tra­te an almost epic gran­deur in the ordi­na­ri­ne­ss of their rea­li­ty and a topi­cal­i­ty in the mild out­da­ted­ness of their archi­tec­tu­ral detail. It is not coin­ci­den­tal that a sen­se of place deri­ves from the con­fron­ta­ti­on of built and natu­ral ele­ments, that memo­ry depends on the inter­play of past and pre­sent and that both occur in con­junc­tion with one another.

The series and in par­ti­cu­lar Düsseldorf, 1996, the motif that has been sel­ec­ted for this edi­ti­on, recall a well-estab­lished pho­to­gra­phic tra­di­ti­on, that of docu­men­ting the places whe­re civi­liza­ti­on and natu­re meet, which in the United States can be tra­ced to records of the geo­lo­gi­cal expe­di­ti­ons of the West during the late nine­te­enth cen­tu­ry, exem­pli­fied by an image such as Timothy O’Sullivan’s Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest, South Side of Inscription Rock, 1873, as well as to more cri­ti­cal exami­na­ti­ons of this phe­no­me­non by »New Topographics« pho­to­graph­ers a cen­tu­ry later, as in Lewis Baltz’s »New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California« series of 1974. While works such as the­se estab­lish gui­de­posts in the coll­ec­ti­ve memo­ry of a medi­um, so too do pho­to­graphs clo­ser to home to a German artist, inclu­ding any one of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s por­tra­yals of fac­to­ry buil­ding faca­des sin­ce the ear­ly 1960’s, as well as more ico­nic stu­dies, such as Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Das Bäumchen (The Little Tree) of 1929. Reference to the Bechers is ine­vi­ta­ble sin­ce Berges stu­di­ed with Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and to Das Bäumchen becau­se Renger-Patzsch’s see­mingly overt­ly objec­ti­ve docu­ment of a spe­ci­fic land­scape also allows for various sym­bo­lic interpretations.

Similarly, Berges’s pho­to­graph remains open in its signi­fi­ca­ti­on, even as it bears refe­rence to indi­vi­du­al for­mal and ico­no­gra­phic ele­ments in all of the images men­tio­ned — the visu­al explo­ra­ti­on of ter­ri­to­ries that com­pri­se the home­land, the stra­te­gic framing of token ele­ments of natu­re, the jux­ta­po­si­ti­on of the natu­ral and built envi­ron­ment to form a modern land­scape, the con­side­red ali­gnment of sur­faces with the pic­tu­re frame in rela­ti­on to the film pla­ne, the latent sym­bo­lism of natu­ral phe­no­me­na within a man-made envi­ron­ment. As much as each of the­se pho­to­graphs may suc­ceed in exploi­ting uni­que pro­per­ties of the medi­um and as much as we may be tempt­ed to asso­cia­te each with distinct natio­na­li­stic, social/historical or technological/artistic con­cerns, each image enters into pos­ses­si­on of the view­er who re-crea­tes it by inser­ting it into his or her own memo­ry bank of visu­al expe­ri­ence. In the case of Laurenz Berges’s images, this is explai­ned by the fact that aspects of memo­ry and place have been addres­sed which are lite­ral­ly clo­se to home to all of us; name­ly tho­se that con­ver­ge to form the con­cept of »resi­den­tia­li­ty« or what it means to resi­de somewhere.