Flughafen Berlin-Tegel, 2020–2021
© Andreas Gehrke

Full Article on Patreon

Andreas Gehrke is someone who I have covered previously for his exceptional photobooks. I have nearly every title he has produced, and standouts include Berlin a Brandenburg, among many others. His output is incredible, and he also self-publishes these titles under his imprint Drittel Books. What I find universal in his titles, beyond his evident skill as a photographer with formal and compositional balance and rigor, is his ability to promote an idea of stillness. Shooting mainly in 5×4 and with all that implies for setting up and framing images, Gehrke typically applies some amount of distance when recording vistas and architecture. His penchant for the latter is a huge draw to many of his projects. Even when studying the interior of the former Der Spiegel office or the IBM Campus, Gehkre’s images relay a spatial intelligence that gives the de-populated subject matter a gravity of stillness often found in his large-format landscape work. He is a master of relating an atmosphere of absolute motionlessness. His work can be characterized by what that implies when he focuses on sites that have a historical value or weight attached to them, such as his work on the site which is known in Berlin as the Topography of Terror, a former WWII torture cell site in the middle of the city, excavated in the 1990s. This work was also published as a multi-artist volume called Land’s End featuring photographs by Joachim Brohm, Michael Disqué, Klaus Frahm, Andreas Gehrke, John Gossage, Volker Heinze, Kai-Olaf Hesse, Lockemann/Neudörfl, Margret Nissen and Michael Schmidt.

Flughafen Berlin-Tegel, 2020–2021
© Andreas Gehrke

Full Article on Patreon

Original Specifications and Press Release.

Andreas Gehrke
Flughafen Berlin-Tegel

Flughafen Berlin-Tegel, 2020–2021
© Andreas Gehrke

On 8 November 2020 the last commercial aircraft departed from Berlin Tegel Airport. It left an emptiness in its wake; but also a utopian space in which the idea, the architecture and the history of the site continue to resonate. In this respect, Berlin Tegel was unlike the major international hubs in Shanghai, Denver, London and Frankfurt am Main which, with their never-ending agglo-merations of departure lounges, check-in counters, retractable barriers, escalators and shopping facilities, hardly differ from one another. As an airport, it wasn’t merely a transit zone of the globalised era; it was also a place with a particular social and historical significance.

Andreas Gehrke visited the site between 2020 and 2021, photographing the once crowded main terminal, the decommissioned airfield and the abandoned auxiliary buildings. His images show a juxtaposition of vision and stagnation, and how these states eventually became reality for Berlin Tegel.