Linen hardcover with dust jacket
26.5 × 33 × 3 cm
160 pages
Color images
English/German text
Essays by Heinz Liesbrock and Thomas Weski
First edition
Walther König
“Early on, the photographer Laurenz Berges was interested in special places in Germany that history seems to have left out or passed over. Laurenz Berges’ continued exploration of the Ruhr area resulted in a series of images of northern Duisburg. He presents himself as fascinated by a contemporary landscape that appears to exist on the opposite side of the present. The photographs convey an artistic intensity that makes them shine in a peculiar way.”
— From press text, Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop
Around 1960, Duisburg was still a lively industrial city with a high quality of life. It was one of the German cities with the highest per-capita income. Its economic foundation was heavy industry, with factories lining the Rhine like a string of pearls. The port, located at the confluence of the Ruhr and Rhine rivers, formed the true lifeline of the city, providing it with identity and stability.
Today, as throughout the Ruhr area, the consequences of a delayed industrial transformation are impossible to overlook. Infrastructure is deteriorating, the city is heavily indebted, and it can no longer afford the costs of many of its essential responsibilities.
The areas that Laurenz Berges has patiently explored in Duisburg over recent years are also marked by this profound decline. He has primarily focused on parts of the city that were once centers of heavy industry. A general erosion of urban qualities becomes visible.
However, these photographs are not about a direct representation of social decline. Berges is instead interested in how elements within the image can communicate, making a deeper dimension of experience perceptible: interiors, architectural details, fragments of nature, and isolated figures.
In Duisburg, he found images of emptiness filled with a profound silence. Light and silence become their messengers. Soft daylight gives rooms an intangible sense of volume. The muted colors appear all the more intense because they do not simply describe surfaces, but reveal the physical presence of things. These photographs contain a slowness of observation that is transferred to the viewer’s contemplation.
Life, in its apparent state of loss, is suspended and finds meaning in the present.
Berges’ photographs describe an inward journey. They are not only about representing the external characteristics of a cityscape, but about exploring an existential dimension: how do we exist in the world?
The photographic recording of life passing through constant cycles is the central theme of his work. In his images, the landscapes of Duisburg evoke a sense of transience and melancholy inherent to human existence.
Silence is balanced by the dimension of pictorial beauty, realized through light and color.