One Wall, Many Languages

The Berlin Wall: from reports of its fall to Alessandro Vicario’s analytical realism.

As we write these notes, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is being marked. There is little to add about the historical and symbolic importance of this event, and we will not devote space to that aspect here. What matters instead is to emphasise how, in art and photography in particular, this event has generated a myriad of initiatives throughout the world and in Italy, many of which have been reported in this magazine. Reportage is undoubtedly the dominant approach, so closely tied as it is to material steeped in history, in the flesh and blood of millions of people. Thousands of powerful images were made by hundreds of photojournalists from around the world who were in Berlin, or travelled there, on those historic days. From the standpoint of the visual analysis that concerns this column, we note that the overwhelming majority of familiar photographs—those published in the press or in widely circulated books—belong to what we might call the classic language of reportage photography: long shots, medium shots and close-ups of the actions taking place, the chipping away of the Wall, the crossing of the old barrier, the celebrations and every other action associated with the population’s spontaneous upheaval. In short, the entire repertoire of traditional social reportage placed at the service of a historical event. Yet among this mass of images, a few works and photographers always stand out through a different language, more refined, distinctive or individual. One need only recall the famous sequence made by Richard Avedon during the 1989 New Year’s Eve celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate. The event itself, the fall of the Wall, had taken place almost two months earlier, but in his highly contrasted, blurred and visually violent frames the great American photographer captured the joy and exhilaration of the citizens celebrating the New Year: Berliners, and others, reunited after the long division of the Cold War years.

Then time, as always, passes inexorably, and these fragments of images relating to the event remain in memory. Can one speak of the Berlin Wall—or, in this particular case, describe it visually—many years after the event? Certainly, just as images taken before its fall remain in the collective imagination. Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of 1963, perhaps the most emblematic among several of the same situation, belongs to the iconographic history of the twentieth century: three people balance on a utility box beside the Wall and look over it. There is therefore a temporal displacement that denies unity of time and action, while the place remains the same. This is the context for Alessandro Vicario’s undertaking among the many initiatives surrounding the anniversary. He went to photograph what remains of the Berlin Wall many years later, with an analytical intention that is almost scientific in character. The Italian photographer, born in 1968, used a large-format camera to obtain the greatest possible sharpness, photographing fragments of what is left of the Wall and presenting them in the exhibition as 1:1 enlargements that restore it to its actual dimensions. Visitors who have never been to Berlin encounter remnants of an important historical structure reproduced with the greatest fidelity to reality, even in its ugliness. The photographed sections of the Wall have been worn by time, sometimes pierced, with their iron framework protruding from the concrete. Where the designs of the colourful murals emerge, they are now faded, flaking and fragmented, to the point of appearing like archaeological remains. In some of Vicario’s images, this produces an unexpected shift from extreme realism to an almost abstract or Informel quality, recalling the visual experiments of the 1950s.

In the mid-1970s, the Italian photographer Antonia Mulas photographed sections of the Wall in black and white, but in long shots that placed it in its surroundings: a pioneering undertaking that is stylistically the exact opposite of Vicario’s present work. These are telling examples of how complex photographic language is, and how it can produce an infinite number of stylistic variations on the same subject. That is what makes it alive and fascinating.

Pio Tarantini