Meeting with the French architect and collector Arthur de Ganay around his collection of photography based in a former factory from East Berlin.
Your collection, installed in Berlin, focuses on architectural and landscape themes from the 1990s to today. What are you looking for, as an architect, in the diverse viewpoints of these 22 exhibited artists?
The art photography that I collect is detached from architectural reality. These artists’ visions, even if they do touch on the same subject – namely architecture –sometimes prove antagonistic. What matters to me is the freedom of interpretation inherent in art itself.
Contemporary German photography from the Dusseldorf School is widely critiqued. How is the objectivity that Bernd and Hilla Becher incorporated in their teachings used here?
Elger Esser, who belongs to the last generation to be trained by the Bechers in the 1990s, is their most important student because he distanced himself from their teachings in the most radical manner. With his rejection of topography – and thus objectivity – he heralded an assumed subjectivity and reintroduced landscape romanticism into contemporary photography. He has often been compared to Caspar David Friedrich, Romantic German painter, but we can also compare part of his work on rivers to Impressionism. One of Esser’s classmates, Laurenz Berges, took a very poetic stance, whereas Götz Diergarten is paradoxically closest to the Bechers with this idea of topographical repetition, of neutrality, that he applies to more anodyne and modern subjects than the industrial heritage [of the Rhine].
Extract of the interview by Gisèle Tavernier
