HANNOVER.- John Gossage, born in New York in 1946, calls his books of photographs “history books”. And indeed, Gossage is best known in Europe for his photographs of Cold War Berlin (Stadt des Schwarz. City of Black, 1987, and Berlin in the Time of the Wall, 2004) as well as for There and Gone (1997), a series of photographs documenting the US-Mexican border, The Romance Industry (1998), whose theme is industrial life in Venice, and the recently reissued The Pond (1985/2010).

In its third solo exhibition devoted to Gossage, the Sprengel Museum Hannover is showing works from his two series The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler and Map of Babylon for the first time in Europe. Both series were presented in a book published by Steidl in 2010.

Gossage trained as a photographer with Lisette Model (1901-1983) and Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971) in the early 1960s, before going on to become a key figure in European photography, albeit rather indirectly. He made many visits to Berlin in the early 1980s, teaching at the photography workshop founded by Michael Schmidt (b. 1945) at an adult education centre in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg and photographing the “black” side of a city where the two rival economic systems and ideologies which shaped post-war history confronted one another.

An interest in borders – whether between East and West, North and South, or nature and civilization – seems to be a central theme running through Gossage’s work, receiving almost literary, film-like treatment in the form of photo books. His images are so finely drawn, their graphic structures so nuanced that, while always remaining faithful to the photographic medium, they can be read like texts.

John Gossage’s photographs are where “atmosphere and real experience” meet.1 By deliberately controlling the depth of field so that some parts of the photograph are in sharp focus while others are blurred, Gossage juxtaposes the non-sensational, the humdrum, the precise phenomenological touch of everyday banality with an imaginary world which always references concrete historical events, often underscoring their epochal significance. In ever new and extremely subtle ways the photographs contrast the “obviously visible” and the “consciously perceived” with the often visually loaded “invisible” and the “fuzzy,” constantly altering the balance between them.

The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler and Map of Babylon are John Gossage’s first works in colour. They have been assembled in a single book which can be read from back to front as well as from front to back.

The setting is Washington DC, the centre of the world, at least in the city’s own eyes. We see neat front gardens laid out with paths and flower beds, respectable architecture, gleaming limousines under a radiant blue sky. Here everything seems to breathe peace, prosperity, and harmony – if it were not for the occasional garden hose lying in an odd position, inexplicable cables, perhaps one or two tinted windscreens too many, a suspicious-looking plastic bag of abandoned rubbish and the strange, eerie, out-of-focus quality of the scene.

Yet people do actually live in this apparently so silent world. From here people travel to their offices every morning and make decisions that change the everyday lives of billions of people. Standing in their kitchens, playing with their children, lying in their beds behind these facades they think about what they have to do to make the world how they would like it to be.

The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler is a standard American measure. Babylon is the imaginary place where we all meet, wherever we come from, the place where we are supposed to find a common language of communication that embraces all cultures and experiences. But what is the measuring unit of this language? (Inka Schube)

1 Quoted from Wolfgang Ullrich, “Unschärfe, Antimodernismus und Avantgarde”, in Ordnung der Sichtbarkeit, Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie, edited by Peter Greiner (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), p. 389.