BERLIN.- Kehrer Berlin Galerie presents the exhibition, »Lob der Wildnis | Serial Landscapes«, featuring photographic series by Henning Rogge (*1977), Arno Schidlowski (*1975) and Anne Schwalbe (*1974). Henning Rogge completed his degree, Arno Schidlowski his Master’s at HAW, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, under Ute Mahler. Anne Schwalbe studied at Berlin’s Ostkreuz School under Ute and Werner Mahler and under Arno Fischer.

Paying reverence to the literary output of the American Henry David Thoreau, the exhibition concentrates on a look at nature, seeking – unlike the Romantic gaze – neither the sublime nor the picturesque. In his writings and posthumously published notes, Thoreau constantly saw nature as natural ›nature of absolute freedom and wildness in contrast to freedom and culture in the bourgeois sense‹. Consistently, Thoreau’s image of man complies with a view that considered man ›as an inseparable part of nature and not as part of society‹. With this positing, Thoreau succeeded in arguing in favour of an experience of nature with which man can regain consciousness: in that ›the value of an experience cannot be measured in the money that can be gained from an experience, but in the degree to which the experience contributes to our development‹.

A nature pictured, as it is presented by the photographic series by Anne Schwalbe, Arno Schidlowski and Henning Rogge, necessarily conveys an examination of nature into the context of aesthetics. In their photographs, nature becomes landscape, because landscape, unlike nature, arises solely through its being perceived and hence is always related to human seeing and consciousness as well as to reflection on an environment. Landscape stands for man’s situation and his experience of it.

The situation that Anne Schwalbe has repeatedly sought out is »Wiesen« (engl. meadows). Green, brown, sparse, colourful and dense meadows, taken in as pleasant and eye-calming colour fields, mostly by the wayside, by one seeking rest and recuperation on strolls through nature. In her cycles »Wiese« and »Wiese XXI–XLVIII«, which Anne Schwalbe began in 2009, the photographer abandons the wandering, distant gaze on meadows in favour of proximity and attention to countless details. The exact location and extent of the »Wiesen« lose their significance. Instead of this, in the photographs of the »Wiesen« their very own, individually specific texture steps into the foreground, as though one were setting off on a journey into the denseness of their nature in order to encounter qualities that formerly existed unknown and unconsciously.

Arno Schidlowski’s series, comprising a total of 49 blackand-white shots, »Der Sonne Mond« (engl. the moon of the sun) was created between 2011 and 2013 from the idea of approaching Earth as a moon of the sun. The thus assumed ›landing‹ of the photographer on Earth posits the question of a subjective exploration of terrain, free of presuppositions and expectations and conducted with curiosity and consideration.

Out of the look at the essence of nature, taken with a blend of morphological and phenomenological interest, develops a kaleidoscope of ›nature as landscape‹, which is characterised by the varied, fascinating light of the photographic view. At the end there is no meticulously compiled logbook on the type and course of the discoveries – there are merely three chapters, »Am Morgen« (engl. in the Morning), »Am Mittag« (engl. at midday), »Am Abend« (engl. in the evening), which the photographer uses to group his series.

Since 2008 Henning Rogge has been following the trail of bomb craters within Germany. His search leads him into little-known regions and forests, onto the terrain and through the undergrowth of history. In the almost 100 photographs in the as yet unfinished series, the »Bombenkrater« finds itself always in the middle ground as an almost perfect, circular hole filled with water in the widest variety of colour and consistency.

The once sudden impact by a civilisation ready to use violence is surrounded by a vegetation that is pristine and that nevertheless exists as part of the overall prospect. Paradoxically enough, the tail of a detonation is now an inviting place to spend a while, in view of a ›nature as landscape‹ that neither subjects itself, nor capitulates, to the courses of time, but is, possibly, simply just itself and nothing else.