The Brooklyn Rail

The history of photography is in many ways intertwined with the history of modern warfare. At first, large, cumbersome cameras and slow exposure times rendered the typically fast-paced and strategically unpredictable events of military combat essentially unphotographable, investing most early photographs of war with a distinctly retrospective impression, as in Alexander Gardner’s and Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s celebrated depictions of the desolated battlefields of the American Civil War. But the history of photography—like the history of warfare—is also a history of technological innovation, and it wasn’t long before photographers, often embedded among soldiers and equipped with handheld cameras, were able to document the split second of a pistol shot or the immediate aftershock of a napalm bombardment with a shocking degree of immediacy. Now, with almost every person on Earth possessing a handheld camera whose powers far exceed those used by earlier professionals, and armed forces increasingly employing camera-equipped drones to surveil and strike targets, the representation of warfare has become both real-time and seemingly perpetual, forcing us to ask whether the exponential expansion of photography into almost all realms of life has made such violence newly visible or, as certain critics have argued, desensitized viewers to the suffering of others.

No signs of warfare are evident in the compelling and complex multiple-exposure color photograph and black-and-white photo collages that the artist Gesche Würfel has created for her show at New York University’s Deutsches Haus. But the work’s central—if notably absent—subject, the Berlin Wall, summons one of the longest and arguably least spectacular wars of the past century: the so-called Cold War waged by the capitalist “First World” (i.e. Europe and The United States) and the communist “Second World” from the end of World War II in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Not a conventional war (which is not to say that people didn’t die or have their lives severely affected by it), the Cold War was essentially fought diplomatically, and, as numerous historians have shown, culturally, with each superpower aspiring to win the “hearts and minds” of its opponents as well as the even more numerous unaligned people of the so-called “Third World” of the Global South. This “cultural Cold War” was largely a war of images and representations, and so it seems fitting that Würfel focuses on one of its most visible and (literally) concrete monuments through the medium of photography, arguably the most important technology in the battle of influencing perception.

The Berlin Wall, constructed mostly in 1961 and famously dissembled in 1989, did, paradoxically, serve as an incidental and already-in-progress war monument to the ideological strife that divided Europe in the aftermath of World War II, as the superpowers of the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union sought to partition much of the continent into ostensibly capitalist and communist nations. The city of Berlin was part of this division and in 1961, the East German government erected the 155-kilometer wall to prevent citizens of East Berlin from traveling (and more importantly, defecting) to West Germany. Würfel’s project was initiated in 2021 and is thus addressed to a reunified Berlin in which most of the original wall has been destroyed—some portions of the wall were left standing as historical artifacts, and numerous fragments now reside in museums and private collections. It is perhaps not incidental that in its place, the city established a pleasant urban pathway known as the Berlin Wall Trail [Berliner Mauerweg] constructed between 2002 and 2006, which has come to serve as what urban planners would call a “living memorial” to the Wall and the larger political conflict that caused it.

To create the large-scaled, densely-hued prints in the current exhibition, Würfel rode her bicycle on the trail, stopping every 2.8 kilometers (the breaks keyed to the twenty-eight years of the Wall’s existence) to aim her camera towards the front, back, left, and right as well as directly above and below her. The artist then combined these six exposures in Photoshop to produce multifaceted, disorienting images in which space seems compressed, and bodies and things often take on a spectral translucence. In the picture that greets viewers on the first floor of the Deutsches Haus, for example, the Brandenburg Gate, that famous Berlin landmark erected between 1788 and 1791 and made notoriously inaccessible by the construction of the Wall, is seen through the ethereal figures standing in front of it (one notably holding a camera) as well as an equally insubstantial light pole. The vertical shaft of this light seems to mirror the classical columns of the monument and the street art stickers that cover it might be seen as echoing the graffiti that once famously covered the western side of the now-destroyed wall.

Würfel’s invocation of a panoptic 360-degree perspective in these works, however artfully tempered into complex yet coherent images, likewise seems to suggest the Wall’s function as a watchtower, as well as the larger dynamics of surveillance that encompassed life in the divided city. This aspect is considered more overtly in the other body of work on view here, the series of “Neue Landschaften” or “New Landscapes.” In these works, photos of sections of the Wall taken by East German secret police, which are now housed in the Stasi Records Archive, serve as the source material for Würfel’s compact and condensed photo collages. While the western surface of the Wall was notably photogenic, serving, for instance, as a popular backdrop for tourist portraiture, inhabitants of East Berlin could not even approach their wall, and photographing it was strictly prohibited. The Stasi pictures, which became public in the years following reunification, were taken as a form of documentation for the secret police to draw upon for training and surveillance. By cutting out the actual wall in each image, the fragments used for “New Landscapes” often produce uncanny voids and juxtapositions whose parabolic and angular edges invest the works with a certain disorienting dynamism. This strange sense of space is further enhanced by Würfel’s decision to keep certain edges of the collaged photos unglued to the surface, so that they physically jut out toward the viewer. Like the complex matrices of angular architecture, brick walls, wire fences, and the complex bramble of tree branches that undergird the compositions of the color prints, the “New Landscape” collages invoke a sense of sutured coherence, at once self-evidently artificial and yet still grounded in the evidentiary rhetoric of photography.

In both bodies of work, these enmeshed matrices of human and natural agency speak to the theme of reconciliation which seems to lie at the heart of Würfel’s project. In these works, contemporary Berlin is still haunted by its divided past, even as the irreversible flow of time renders the material traces of history increasingly imperceptible, gradually reclaimed by nature. As in the earliest war photographs, Würfel’s images present a strange retrospective temporality, in which the absent past is somehow summoned forth, perhaps in part through the still strangely powerful capacity of the camera to, in technical terms, apprehend light energy as it travels through space and time. In this way, Würfel’s highly remediated pictures suggest a sort of homeopathic treatment that aims to remedy photography’s crucial role in the history of Berlin during the Cold War.