Laurenz Berges (born Cloppenburg, 1966) is a German photographer. [1] [2] He graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as Master Student under Bernd Becher in 1996. [3] [4] Berges' work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York [5] and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. [6]
Berges' photographic work focuses primarily on transience. Between 1991 and 1995, Berges photographed the interiors of East German barracks that had been abandoned by the Red Army after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his book Etzweile, Berges documented Etzweiler, the district of Elsdorf that had to make way for open-pit lignite mining. [7] For years, the artist also photographed wastelands in the de-industrialized city of Duisburg. Berges finds his subjects in the urban gray areas: It is details from abandoned apartments, vacated houses, and overgrown gardens that interest him and that he makes the subject of a poetic, yet strictly documentary pictorial composition. In view of these photographs from the no-man's land between use and decay, recent past and foreseeable future, one could almost speak of the photographic equivalent of Arte Povera. [8]
Berges' work is held in the following public collections: