Julia Galandi-Pascual (2011)

» (...) Very few people up until now have been aware of Bert Jäger (born in Karlsruhe in 1919) as a photographer. Indeed, in recent years, his abstract paintings have been showcased at selected solo exhibitions and have garnered the attention of a wider audience; but this is the first time a comprehensive publication has focused on his photographs. Which is all the more surprising given that they illustrate to perfection the blurring of genre distinctions between art photography and journalistic and documentary practice in Germany in the late 1950s. It is a trend that has otherwise been observed primarily in American photography, first in the 1930s. For it was during the Great Depression in the United States that the negative repercussions of industrialisation was extensively documented through photography for the first time. Walker Evans (1903–1975) among others was commissioned by the government to photograph the plight of rural populations severely affected by the economic crisis. Evans focused on the quotidian, so much so that, as with a form of journalistic interest, we find ourselves searching in vain for the extraordinary or sensational in these social documentary photographs.

His photographs of poverty-stricken seasonal workers are as poignant today as they ever were. Not only are they contemporary documents, but they also represent successful individual images in formal terms that operate within the ambit of documentary practice and artistic concept. Focussing on the everyday world of American society while deliberately rejecting the instrumentalisation of documentary photography for the purposes of social change, Evans became an important reference point for a further generation of so-called documentary art photographers who, like Bert Jäger on his travels through Italy and France, found their motifs in public spaces, on the streets and in shops. In their photo documentary projects Robert Frank (born 1924), Lee Friedlander (born 1934) and Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) also explored everyday life in the second half of the 20th century, albeit the American experience. While these exponents of so-called street photography also adhere in principle to the realistic image-capturing capabilities of the medium, unlike Jäger they deliberately reflect the social and cultural conditions of the photographic image, disregarding technical perfection among other things.