Featuring photography by Elmar Haardt (on his website it’s the Nord project) and Bernd Kleinheisterkamp (his Siedlung project), Angesichts der Lage/In View of the Situation is a portrait of the same place, a part of the German city of Essen. Previously one of the most eminent industrial places in Germany, if not Europe (home of the Krupp family), Essen has undergone a lot of changes; and while it still is the home of a lot of corporations, it has also developed into a major arts center.
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The Higley portrayed by Andrew Phelps in his book Higley is everywhere. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. There are different ways of dealing with this change (unfortunately, the idea of “change” has recently been turned into a political cliché, where it can mean anything and nothing). It is tempting to use photography as a way to refuse to participate in change or, at least, to protest against it: You take some photographs, and then you hold them up and say “Here, look at this, this is all gone now!” Or you can simply document, neither looking back or forward, and you then let the images speak and the viewers decide. This latter approach is Phelps’: “it’s not my place to judge.”
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On July 1, 1990, a few months before re-unification, (then West) German Chancellor Helmut Kohl addressed West and East Germans on TV and said “No one will be worse off than before - but many will be better off. […] If we work together, we will be able to turn Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania and Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia into blooming landscapes again, places where living and working really pays off.” It was not to be. One of the dirty secrets of the re-unification of Germany is that it was not run efficiently and well planned. A lot of money was spent, and the many infrastructure projects did create a short-lived economic boom, but a lot of money was wasted, poured into projects that nobody needed or needs; and the dismantling of East Germany’s ancient industries created large waste lands: blooming landscapes yet again, but with few people to enjoy it and a staggering rise in the number of political extremists, both to the very left (neo-Communist) and the very left (neo-Nazi).
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Just like Doug Dubois’ All the Days and Nights, Thekla Ehling’s Sommerherz is a portrait of family life. Unlike Doug, Thekla focused on her own children and on friends.
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“Photographs capture a moment in time,” writes Jessica Backhaus in the afterword of her book What Still Remains. If anything, this sentence contains the essence of its photography: Moment in time. Or at least half of it, since the other, unspoken, half is occupied by a photographer who notices something about a moment and takes a photograph.
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