Grenzfälle / Falling Barriers / Edgeland Ghosts: Wanderings #30/52a

I suppose if you take the phrase edgelands as in part referring to transitional areas, often where industry/man made areas meet the countryside, then the book Grenzfalle / Falling Barriers could be seen as a document of a type of edgelands…

…but, well this is an edgelands with a particular brutal, brutalist architecture.

The book was published in 2009 and is a collection of photographs taken by six different photographers of the barriers that divided East and West Germany, just as the country began to be reunited.

(The photographers in question are Gerhard Zwickert, Eberhard Kloppel, Peter Leske, Heinz Dargelis, Werner Schulze, Bernd-Horst Sefzik.)

While a lot of imagery of such things has focused on the Berlin wall, this is more a document of the barriers in the landscape, next to frontier villages and so on.

There’s a curious harshness or possibly even (static) violence to these structures, their purpose and the philosophy that underlined them.

It is a fascinating, enthralling, moving book and I’m rather glad I found it.

Although the images were taken in 1990, they seem to harken back to an earlier, nearer mid century time somehow and reminded me of Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology photographs…

I could easily be posting most of the images within it from now to whenever but I thought the best way to go about it was possibly to select just one book spread by each of the six photographers (not an easy task)… so here goes…