Spreeblitz is a
collection of black and white photographs taken over a tenyear period in
Spreepark, a themepark in Plänterwald in the Treptow-Köpenick suburb of
Berlin that was formerly under GDR control. In 2001,the park declared
bankruptcy, and thearea was characterized by ruin and vandalism. Berlin
bought the parkback in 2014 and the plan is to reestablish the area as a
modern cultural park around 2026. During the years nature has slowly
reclaimed its old space. Texts by Jytte Rex and Tove Thage.
Fie
Johansen (b. 1953) is one of the pioneers of digital art photography in
Denmark. She has infused digital technology with the spirit and soul of
analogue darkroom technology. She studied and worked at the Institute
for Visual Communication at the Royal Danish Academy while co-founding
Billedhuset, an association of leading Danish and Swedish art and
documentary photographers. She was awarded the Photographic Book Prize
by the Ministry of Culture in 1997, and she took part in the extensive
photo documentary project Denmark in Transition, from 2006 to
2011. She has been awarded thethree-year work grant from the Ministry of
Culture and the Ole Haslund Foundation´s honorary award.
“Fie
Johansen masters and liberates photography. With few ordinary props,
she creates cinematographic scenes and captures the tensions and
anxieties of a claustrophobic urban environment where freedom, pleasure,
and curiosity are now held in check, frozen in time. Spreeblitz
is melancholy, but the sorrow is caught in a propitiatory humorous
overawareness.The subjects stand independently, sometimes morphing into
enigmatic, amorphous shadows. Not even a flashlight would help here,
where the darkness in the deeplyt inted prints is all-encompassing.”
(Tove Thage)
