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UFERSPAZIERGANG (RIVER WALK)
From April 1993 to April 1994 I worked as a photographer for the Human Geography Institute at the University of Basel, Switzerland. The main project that involved me there was a book which focused on the Rhine river called Uferzone - Stadträume am Rhein In Basel, which roughly translates as Riverside-Zone - City-Space Along The Rhine in Basel. The photographic aspect of the project dealt with questions concerning the intersection of nature and culture. The work employs a documentary style in the service of visually describing the human use of the river and riverside. There were over eighty images of mine included in the book. A smaller portfolio of selected images, including a few that were excluded from the book, has since been printed. This time I'm less interested in an "Uferspaziergang" (a stroll along the river), but rather walking the river's edge and exploring the space of transition. I have only reprinted those I still love and tried to let the work be refueled by that emotion.
Here are some of the slightly edited concluding words I wrote in 1993 on the piece that were also published in Uferzone (originally in German):
How can the artist compose or photograph something new, in a new manner? To what extent is tradition embraced? In River Walk I have tried to stay on the middle way, neither falling into the pit of the postcard picturesque, as for example in focusing too much attention on the ferry boats to which an entire book full of romantic photos already exists, nor the extreme of abstraction, as is the case with much art photography. The former lacks intelligence and creativity; the latter sometimes associates itself with the look of modern art without necessarilly always tracing its original significance. Such undercurrent thoughts influenced this project.
A poem is a document of intimacy that a group of photographs seldom is. A series of images is at best similar to what the American poet William Carlos Williams commented about poetry: "...tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events themselves, but solely from the attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance by giving them thus a full being."
In mythological and spiritual literature, as well as folk and pop songs the river is a metaphor for life; an energy channel which feeds and is fed by all that surrounds it. Crossing to the other shore is regarded as the aim of every aspirant on the path, meaning, in short, to wake up from ignorance, recognizing the interdependence of all things; disposing of the mistaken substantiality and inflexibility of all phenomena and events. The river flows; just like the mind, it never stops. Eventually emptying into the ocean and rising again into the sky...it even passes through Basel. A picture, or group of pictures, is not exactly a metaphor, although it may function like one insofar as it exerts a descriptive force which in certain contexts invites the imagination of the viewer to make a cognitive leap towards something not pictured. The point is that both pictures and words evoke mental images, concepts, emotions, and projections, however, pictures are not expository texts, and are generally underpriviledged by the scientific community. This book is filled with many pages of facts, information, ideas, history, and plans concerning the geography of the Rhein. I am grateful that some space has been allotted for a block of photos which are not always purely journalistic, but rather as a whole seek to resonate with the "Erhebung without motion" made explicit in T.S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton.
(11 x 14 inch silver-gelatin prints)
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