Simone Nieweg: Landschaften und Gartenstücke. Landscapes and Gardens. 2002
Schirmer and Mosel, Munich. 2002. First edition, first printing. Manfred Heiting, Thomas Wiegand: Deutschland im Fotobuch, page 72. Hardcover with jacket. 325 x 248 mm. 144 pages. 74 photos (71 in color, 3 in black and white). Texts: Els Barents, Saskia Asser, Andrea Domesle. Simone Nieweg studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf in the class of Bernd Becher ("Anonyme Skulpturen")
THOMAS WIEGAND, MANFRED HEITING
Welche Fotobücher haben auf besonders überzeugende und charakteristische Weise Einblick in »Deutschland« gegeben? Deutschland im Fotobuch zeigt sie: Bücher aus den letzten Tagen des Kaiserreichs und der Weimarer Republik, aus dem »Dritten Reich«, der Bundesrepublik, der DDR und dem wiedervereinigten Deutschland. Viele wichtige Fotografen sind mit gestalterisch geschlossenen Werken zum Thema vertreten: August Sander und Albert Renger-Patzsch, Abisag Tüllmann und Edith Rimkus, Leonard Freed und George Hashiguchi, Dirk Reinartz,Chargesheimer, Will McBride, Heinrich Riebesehl, Christian Borchert, Willem van de Poll, Sem Presser, Aart Klein, Shinkichi Tajiri, Kim Bouvy, Nico Jesse u.v.a. Deutschland im Fotobuch versammelt 273 Werke, die mit Beispielseiten, einem kurzen Text und bibliografischen Daten vorgestellt werden. Der Band ist in thematische Gruppen gegliedert: Landschaften, Städte, Menschen, Arbeit, Architektur, Zeitgeschehen, Grenzen, »Typisch deutsch« u.a. Jedes Kapitel wird von einem Essay eingeleitet.
Simone Nieweg
Goethe-Institut, London
Jacqui McIntosh
Thu 25 Sep 2003 02.49
Simone Nieweg's landscapes show the type of countryside you often see only fleetingly from a car window - at first glance unspectacular, but on closer inspection revealing a subtle beauty. Nieweg, whose work, Landscapes, is on show at the Goethe-Institut, studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, where she was taught by Bernd Becher during the late 1980s. Like her famous predecessors Ruff, Struth and Gursky, she has brought her own personal slant to the Becher aesthetic.
On show here are three examples of her landscapes. Compositionally, Nieweg places us in the photograph with a viewpoint that leads the eye around the landscape, picking up more detail the longer we look. In Gemähtes Feld, a mown pathway travels through a field to the horizon, where trees are planted in a row, wooden structures protecting their bases. These landscapes are devoid of human presence, but everywhere there is evidence of intervention: tractor marks, a road sign in the distance, orderly trees. The technical precision and scale of these colour prints show an imposed order within which nature is quietly rebelling by refusing to be neat and tidy.
This small exhibition forms part of a larger body of work entitled Grabeland. Since 1986 Nieweg has photographed the agricultural landscape found on the outskirts of towns and industrial areas in the Rühr and Lower Rhine. Plots of unused land, leased out for one year, are transformed into richly planted allotments, after which they are ploughed and left unseeded. Nieweg photographs subjects such as gates, fields and allotments. All show individuality, reflecting the personality of their owners: sheds held together with wire and corrugated iron tacked haphazardly to wooden frames; rickety structures, that, despite their impermanence, have been carefully built. Her approach is not dissimilar to the Becher: grouping subjects together like objects, disclosing similarities and differences. Nieweg documents structures before they cease to exist.
Landscapes is Nieweg's first UK exhibition. She presents us with a landscape which is unspectacular yet quietly beautiful. For all their apparent objectivity, you can imagine walking through these landscapes and, stopping to look, getting your feet a little muddy in the process.
· Until November 22. Details: 020-7596 4000.
Gardens as a Cultural Construct
Simone Nieweg (b. 1962) is a good example of the influence of place, time and even the experience of viewers on their perception of art works. Between 1948 and 1989, Czech photography preferred different approaches than Western Europe, accepting mainly those impulses that were in harmony with “lyric movements” defined as typically Czech by Jaroslav Boček no later than in 1962. In the Czech Republic, the work of Simone Nieweg was first displayed in Distance and Closeness, a group exhibition presenting the Düsseldorf School of Photography at the ÚLUV Gallery in the centre of Prague in the early 1990s. Back then her photos caused even more outrage than the photographs her mentor Bernd Becher made with his wife. Facing mining towers, gasholders, coke oven plants, half-timbered residential buildings and other “anonymous sculptures” from 1830 to 1930, Czech viewers drew on documentary or preservationist approaches, but standing in front of Simone Nieweg’s beds of cauliflower and cabbage, they were utterly helpless and their experience with Czech art photography was rendered useless. Sixteen years later, in 2007, when the same exhibition appeared the House of Art in České Budějovice, the very same artists were considered classics of photography. The works of the Bechers and some of their disciples have been also displayed in Prague and in several large exhibitions, e.g. Of Body and Other Things: German Photography of the 20th Century (Municipal Library in Prague, 2003), solo exhibitions of Bernd and Hilla Bechers (Rudolfinum, 2012), Barbara Probst (Rudolfinum, 2014), and Jörg Sasse (House of Art, České Budějovice, 2015).
The Düsseldorf School of Photography, nowadays firmly established, emerged from the studio of photography at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf to teach us to think differently with the help of a camera. Bernd and Hilla Bechers worked systematically to do away with aesthetizing and focusing on light and subjectivity, the very requirements of the Czech photography of the time. Thanks to certain conceptual approaches, their work was often reflected in the context of contemporary art, embodying the dispute of two worlds: the world of art photography and the world of contemporary art. The multilayered value of the Bechers’ photographs is evident in the merging of contemporary art discourse with the autonomous tradition of photography. With the Bechers, just as with Blossfeld’s natural studies, we witness careful research into the strange ancient laws of economics, finding basic functional approaches across regions and decades fuelled by the industrial revolution. Following in the footsteps of the German tradition from the 1920s and 1930s, they photographed industrial sites, doing it with great objectivity and precision. Their thorough search for a technique, which would make it possible to transfer the laws of functionality and economy that shaped their objects into flat, two-dimensional images, later arranged in typological series, was interesting for conceptual artists. But their precise use of photographic technique should earn them praise from photographers, and their interest in the annihilated world of hard labour, which to a large extent moved from Europe to Asia, should be popular with the public who does not care about petty squabbles in the art world.
While teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy, Bernd Becher (1931–2007) founded the studio of photography (of which he was the head in 1976–1996) and let his students create post-conceptual series, often reflecting architecture and urban space. They learnt to notice not just the exceptional, but most of all the common, the everyday things that surround us more than anything else, and, as such, have the biggest impact on our taste, giving evidence of our own lives. But the students did not develop typological series close to the heart of their teacher, focusing rather on technique, technical processes, style forming of the annulled individual idiosyncrasy and objectivist approach. Thanks to these characteristics, the “Düsseldorf School of Photography”, a term used for the work of Becher Studio graduates, became a great market brand. The Becher Studio was attended by a number of now-famous photographers, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Axel Hütte, Candida Höfer, Simone Nieweg, Jörg Sasse, and Petr Wunderlich.
While the majority of the Czech audience might still see these photographs as a titillating combination of provocation and boredom, an informed viewer sees them for what they are: the classic works of New
Topographics. Thirty years later, the aesthetics of banality has been repeated many times over and quite thoroughly explored even in our country — by the duo Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, some members of the group Pondělí, Michal Kalhous and many other photographers from a younger generation.
The authors labelled the “Düsseldorf School” photographers typically find a very small patch of the world that they systematically, almost obstinately examine with a camera for years on end, trying hard to convince the people around them of the seriousness and far-reaching consequences of their work. The very same approach is offered by Simone Nieweg, whether she photographs gardens, edges of fields, or forest, capturing strategies of cultivation perfected over centuries and landscapes formed by these structures. Her books Landscapes and Gardens (2003) and Nature Man-Made (2012) published by Schirmer/Mosel in Munich give an account of her continuous examination and of changes in her approach to these issues. She religiously sticks to her chosen technique, which she keeps developing: from growing vegetables in suburban gardens to edges of fields, field tracks and borderlines of fields and forests, observing how this hobby forms a distinctive urban space dotted with strange sculptures. Apart from plants, she focuses on simple garden houses, temporary shelters for people and gardening tools, and various improvisations and imitations able to fence off plots, to demarcate garden beds or compost heaps, to support the plants, or to make all kinds of little traps and scarers. Looking at these photos, we cannot help consider a particular context that the author could not have imagined: many of us still remember gardening in the normalisation1 era, those weekly escapes from public life to the privacy of cottages and small garden patches. Now, gardening is again gaining popularity, both in the suburbs and in the form of urban gardening in gaps between houses or on roofs. But let us not forget that Simone Nieweg has been photographing “her” gardens since the mid-1980s.
She herself specifies that when she was taking the photographs of gardens, her aim was to capture a world that seemed destined for extinction in the highly industrialised environment in which she lived. Additionally, in the atmosphere following the Chernobyl disaster, she wanted to portray this world as objectively and accurately as possible.
Her photographs do not fall into strictly composed series; they are rather presented as individual images with their own specifically coloured horticultural products, morning frost and soft light. It is what makes her work different from the accurate, cold and intellectual work of her better known peers from the Academy. But the enthusiasm and distance she adopts to explore this small patch of the world and archetypes of the organisation, production and space management of horticulture provide a firm bond with the Düsseldorf brand.
Tomáš Pospěch
Simone Nieweg / Cultivated in the Open, Photographs / with Wout Berger, Laura Samsom-Rous, Hans Scholten, Han Singels
past / 2 March 2002 / 26 May 2002
Woods, open fields, farmland, sheds, fences, compost heaps and vegetable gardens of kale, green cabbage, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, beans and a pumpkin. The photographs of Simone Nieweg display the seemingly disorganized look of what is called “grown in the cold ground” in Dutch – vegetables grown outdoors as opposed to those cultivated in glasshouses. Unlike the classical tradition in landscape painting, she does not seek a form of the picturesque or romantic landscape. Nor is the heroic or sublime landscape against which man appears insignificant a theme in her work. Simone Nieweg has chosen the neglected, ordinary landscape of the vegetable garden that extends into open land and fields, with woods further in the distance. These are precisely the spots where nature reveals the presence of man most vividly. Here, at the edge of city and countryside, the boundary between culture and nature, where gardens merge into fields or meadows, Simone Nieweg finds an inexhaustible source of subject matter. People are not directly visible here, but their traces are all the more so. This is the so-called Nutzlandschaft (utilitarian landscape), or more specifically, the Grabeland (wasteland), which in Germany is utilized in a slightly different way than in Holland. It comprises leftover pieces of land that have not yet been allocated by city planners and until then are free for private use. Simone Nieweg has sought out these fallow bits of land for about twenty years, initially in the area around Bielefeld where she grew up, later in the surroundings of Düsseldorf , the land of the Niederrhein, where she now lives.
For centuries, the kitchen garden has skirted all forms of fashion or aesthetic gratification. It is precisely here, in this terrain vague of metropolitan culture, at the point where strollers turn back toward the city or quicken their steps toward the woods ahead, that Simone Nieweg chooses to find her motifs. In the ground glass of her camera (in which an image appears upside down) she manages to introduce a hitherto unperceived order and structure. She makes no moral judgements, but observes, analyzes and structures. With her passion for the landscape of the vegetable garden, she no more walks the beaten path of landscape painting than landscape photography.
On her numerous walking tours she follows no traditions – simply footmarks along farmland, open fields, pastures, meadows and gardens. Places where she has already been many times before. The light, the weather conditions, and the time of the year lead her to the spot where she takes a photo at that moment with great precision.
Simone Nieweg’s first foreign museum exhibition has additionally been reason to show a selection of Dutch photographs of vegetables grown in the cold (and the warm) ground. Hans Scholten photographs very specific areas indeed, areas which lie between the city and countryside. He finds these pieces of no man’s land not just in the Netherlands but all over the world. They are “terrains vagues”, landscapes where man was once present but where nature has slowly reclaimed its grip. No more than Simone Nieweg does Hans Scholten want to comment upon these areas; he chiefly wants to impart the feeling of this landscape as space. His use of richly contrasted, monumental black and white photography very definitely elicits a feeling of struggle between countryside and city, whereas with Simone Nieweg man and nature seem to coexist more harmoniously. The same harmonious, concentrated focus on the micro landscape can be found in the poetic photographs that Laura Samsom-Rous has made of trees and gardens. The greatest specialist in this area, however, is photographer Wout Berger; his photographs of glasshouses are one of a kind. He proves that the straightforward miniature cosmos of the nurseryman differs from the viewpoints of classical art in all respects, especially because the horizon in the photograph is above the actual horizon. Han Singels, finally, has followed in the footsteps of Paulus Potter and the artists of the School of the Hague, photographing the Dutch landscape with especial emphasis upon its cows.
Uitgekiende foto's van een saai landschap
Dat de Duitse Simone Nieweg (1962) haar opleiding kreeg van het fotografenechtpaar Bernd en Hilla Becher aan de kunstacademie van Düssseldorf, is al bij eerste aanblik duidelijk. Net als de Bechers, onlangs nog onderscheiden met de Erasmusprijs 2002, hanteert Nieweg een afstandelijke registrerende stijl in met technische camera's gemaakte en tot op de centimeter uitgekiende foto's en presenteert zij haar werk in uniforme reeksen. En evenals haar leermeesters, bekend geworden met hun foto's van vakwerkhuizen en mijntorens, richt ook zij zich op het moderne semi-landschap: in haar geval akkertjes en moestuinen in de periferie van dorp en stad. Een ruime selectie daarvan is momenteel te zien op de expositie Foto's van de koude grond in Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.
Eddie Marsman
19 maart 2002
Op het formaat van 100 bij 130 centimeter toont Nieweg een akker met hoog opgeschoten gras, rechts staat een rijtje bomen, links in de verte eveneens. Op de horizon, hoog in beeld, staan enkele huizen. Er is een telegraafpaal, een gele bouwkraan, een elektriciteitsmast. Je ziet van alles en toch heb je de indruk vooral niets te zien. Ja toch, tussen al het groene gras: twee gele sprieten – een ontdekking van jewelste. Op een andere foto is een strookje koren vastgelegd, ingeklemd tussen een bomenrij en een asfaltweggetje dat zich verraadt in een driehoekje rechts onderin. Inderdaad: je zou het zo maar kunnen tegenkomen tijdens een zondagse wandeling door de landerijen – als je het opmerkt. Net als de modderige akker, de scheve akker, de windstille akker, de keurig onderhouden en de braakliggende akker. Strak en koel staat het er allemaal op.
Niewegs moestuinfoto's, zestien in getal en op aanmerkelijk kleiner formaat, zijn te zien in een tweede zaal. Ze zijn wat losser van karakter. Waar Nieweg bij de akkerfoto's afstand neemt, kruipt ze hier haar onderwerp dichter op de huid, waardoor de menselijke sporen de aandacht trekken: groene en witte hekjes, een gele pompoen, een omgevallen emmer, een bak met loof. Maar tot en met de fletse, nergens heldere kleuren overheerst ook hier het gevoel van visueel understatement. Het zijn foto's van niks eigenlijk, die er met een strenge vinger op wijzen dat dit alles de aandacht wel degelijk waard is.
Uiteraard zijn er (zoals in de catalogus uitvoerig gebeurt) de nodige zinvolle vergelijkingen mogelijk met de romantische tradities van het geschilderde landschap, maar dat maakt deze fotografie nog niet enerverend. Want wat je gaandeweg overvalt bij het zien van Nieuwegs studieuze fotografie is vooral een gevoel van willekeur en onverschilligheid – een effect dat omgekeerd is aan de intentie.
Zou het daarom zijn dat haar presentatie is aangevuld met een handjevol foto's van Nederlandse collega's die, zij het minder consequent, eveneens het moderne landschap vastleggen? De bijdragen van Hans Scholten en Wout Berger (enigszins vergelijkbaar met die van Nieuweg) en van Laura Samson-Rous en Han Singels (meer geënt op de schilderkunst – van Singels bijvoorbeeld zijn zes warme, Paules Potter-achtige foto's te zien waarin koeien de hoofdrol spelen) maken de presentatie als geheel weliswaar wat gevarieerder, maar hun bijdragen zijn te gering om van een degelijke confrontatie van benaderingen te spreken.
Gelijktijdig met de Duitse en Nederlandse landschapsfotografen toont Huis Marseille in de kelderruime een kleine keuze uit de uit diverse Nederlandse collecties afkomstige 19de eeuwse foto's die recent op het web werden geplaatst (www.earlyphotography.nl). Het is een willekeurige greep: enkele daguerreotypieën van Eduard Isaac Asser, twee portretten van het Schotse duo Hill en Adamson, een betoverend vrouwenportret van de Nederlander Louis Wegner, een landschap van Gustave le Gray, een fotogram van bloemblaadjes uit 1839 gemaakt door fotopionier Henri Fox Talbot, een pornofoto uit 1855. Maar een verrassing is de foto die de Fransman Henri le Secq rond 1852 maakte in het bos van Montmirail. Langs de kant van de weg (een miniem strookje laat zich ontwaren, bijna terloops in de hoek) fotografeerde hij een enkele verfomfaaide struiken. Er staan wat berkenboompjes, in de droge aarde liggen ruige kiezelstenen. Een foto van niks: toen al.
`Foto's van de Koude Grond' T/m 26 mei in Huis Marseille, Keizersgracht 401, Amsterdam. Inl 020-5318989 of www.huismarseille.nl
