Wout Berger
fotografie
FOCUSING
By Wout Berger
Usually, a landscape photo is built up with a foreground, a horizon, and the sky
above. When we look at such a photo, we let our gaze settle downwards from
above, and then zoom in. The horizon is at a distance of some kilometres in
perspective and, depending on the standpoint, hundreds of meters wide. As our
gaze slowly glides down, we come closer to the landscape we look into, the
distance of the exposure grows smaller, and the smaller the distance, the more
that the ratio between picture and reality will approach a proportion of 1: 1.
We see in a steadily increasing close-up.
Over the last féw years, I have increasingly directed my view to the foreground,
and the horizon has disappeared out the top of the picture. I photograph
close-ups within a receding frame of a féw square meters; I do not need more. As
a pleasant consequence, the somewhat boring pattern of 'foreground, horizon, and
sky' no longer plays a role.
One reason why I photograph small patches of land is that 'nature' is
persistently withdrawing from the landscape. The BeNeLux landscape is a
nature/culture landscape from which ‘nature' is disappearing as a result of
human interventions, making place for a so-called 'culture-landscape'. My photos
do not make a value judgement, and I experience culture as a niche for nature.
Nature/culture landscape, polluted landscape, agricultural landscape, asphalted
landscape, or landscape in a social/historical perspective: whenever I am in a
landscape, these types of informative categorizations seem like distant echoes,
of hardly any significance.
'Focusing' is a phenomenological* photographic idea and focusing is what I do.
Varieties of annual flowers bloom magnificently on sandy land-fills, and I see
blue thistles, yellow blossoms, and needle and leafy scrub growing in between
and on top of dark grey clumps of clinker ash and gravel of coal waste. The
shoulders of roads are a true paradise.
To end with a few odds and ends of thoughts: Photography is a medium of the
outside. The potential of photography lies in its power to give structure to the
outside and, ultimately, to draw a deeper significance up to the surface.
Photography is visual means of communication, a visual language in which I can
express myself as a photographer. Everything can be photographed, and probably
already has been, a thought which can bring on enough of a depression to make
any desire to photograph disappear. The same thought, however, also gives
freedom, because originality is then secondary. What matters are content and
form.
*Phenomenology: a philosophical direction or method, which by as precisely as
possible describing the content of our ideas and by following the path of
intuitive observation, attempts to discover the authentic existence of things.
Images Wout Berger, courtesy of Galerie van Kranendonk, The Hague (NE)
www.vankranendonk.nl
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