The terrain that Laurenz Berges patiently explored in Duisburg over the past few years is comparable to the foregoing description of the Ruhr district’s deeply seated communal misery. He mainly kept to the quarters that were formerly sites of heavy industry and are now suffering the most from the effects of structural change. A general decline in the quality of urban life is obvious. These photographs never attempt to portray concrete examples of social maldevelopment, however. Berges is instead interested in how to make the things in the image speak in order to render understandable a dimension of experience: interiors, architectural details, fragments of nature, a person here and there. Berges’s mode of work is indirect. His photographs create a parallel reality that transcends details and seeks a holistic visual effect all the more emphatically.
In Duisburg he found images of a void that is filled with a fundamental silence. A feeling of forlornness and disorientation seems to lie over the city, a condition known as bardo in Buddhism: that is to say, a transitional state between death and rebirth. This explains the unique intensity of the visual effect. Light and silence are its messengers. Soft daylight fills the rooms, inside and out, with an intangible volume. The matte appearance of the colors intensifies their effect because they are no longer a superficial manifestation, but corporeal instead. They almost seem to sink into the image surface. There is an unhurriedness of observation inherent in these pictures that communicates itself to the viewer. Life in its putative fleetingness is brought to a halt and attains fulfillment in ubiety.
— Heinz Liesbrock
