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| Between City and Country |
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Between City and Country – A Trip through Germany
Home:Sweet:City
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| Between City and Country 1998 - 2004 | Betwixt Germany’s cities and rural areas lie its towns. “Between City and Country” is a photographic study of more than 30 of those in-between locations, carried out over a four-year period starting in 1998. The photos create a panorama of everyday life in towns no one knows but those who live there, places no one wants to go but those who already call them home. These are towns with populations between 20,000 and 120,000, settings where the everyday takes place between home and the pedestrian zones. “Between City and Country” attempts to shed light on the compression of space in these towns and the non-spaces within them—run-down sections, abandoned parks, blind spots, and gaps. The camera’s lens is directed toward the side streets that lead off from the pedestrian areas, toward the sights that appear in the glossy pamphlets of the municipal tourist offices, and toward that rarest, because most perfectly-concealed, phenomena: normality.
Town, Country, River by Jenny Gaschke
Art and documentation are a mismatched pair, but occasionally art becomes the seismograph of its time. In the best cases, it even captures the movements of a generation. The artist Stefanie Bürkle has aligned herself with her times. For those of us who grew up in the 1970s—as Bürkle, who was in born in Heilbronn in 1966, did—her art gives visual form to the tremors of an experience long ignored because it seemed so normal.
Her “Eiscafé Venezia” photo series takes as its subject the ice cream parlors common in small towns across West Germany in the 1970s and 80s. Bürkle photographs the facades of these “Eiscafé Venezias” in their everydayness, even their banality—the way they would look if one were just walking by. In this way, her photos invite sentimental associations of an innocent youth of which the Eiscafé was a much-loved part. Yet Bürkle does not let herself get lost in the past. Nor does she succumb to the kind of brand-name infatuation one finds in Florian Illies’s “Generation Golf,” where childhood experiences are meticulously assembled around products and consumerism.
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