WOUT BERGER

When I Open My Eyes

For over thirty-five years, Wout Berger has lived on the IJsselmeer, a freshwater lake in central Netherlands. It is the first thing he sees each morning and his artistic subject matter, besides the landscape and atmosphere of his daily life. From a tripod fixed by his bedroom window, Berger began to photograph whatever he saw. First recorded were the differences—every sailboat, every spectacular sunset, but, eventually the project became more refined. Berger began to capture the amorphous shapes of waves, fog, rain and clouds fading into the photographic surfaces. Recalling both Impressionist light studies and Olafur Eliasson’s photo series of his home country of Iceland, Berger’s subject, however exquisite and incandescent, eventually morphs from the IJsselmeer to the imperceptible transitions between the photographs themselves.

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NICOLE BLAFFERT AND FRANZ WAMHOF

JHQ

Städtisches Museum Schloss Rheydt (Ed.)

JHQ, short for “Joint Headquarters,” designates the merger of various military general staffs of NATO and the British armed forces in Germany. The complex, built between 1952-1954 and scheduled to close in 2013, resembles a small town. German photographers Nicole Blaffert and Franz Wamhof lived at the JHQ over a period of two months, recording the architecture, landscape and people, and resulting in an intimate photographic document in the tradition of Atget and Evans. JHQ details the dissolution of a Cold War relic before our eyes. Additional texts from V&A Museum Senior Curator of Photographs, Martin Barnes.

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