Book Review: Medebach

Medebach: Photographs 1979-1983

One of the books that I chose to read for this assignment was Petra Wittmar’s Medebach. This book was comprised of about sixty black and white photographs taken in Wittmar’s hometown of Medebach between the years 1979 and 1983. The book was slightly larger than 8x10 inches, and included an introduction and an interview with Wittmar. None of the pictures in the book faced each other; each photograph appeared on the right side with a blank page to the left. The photographs in the book are mostly of buildings, although these are broken up by occasional shots of interiors. The way that the photographs are framed is very interesting; nothing is photographed from directly in front of it or is placed in the center of a photograph. Rather, buildings are almost always seen from the side and from down the street. The framing is very deliberate, but almost appears haphazard: buildings and objects are often cut off at the sides of the photographs and things seem to jut into the photos at strange angles. Things are also often blocked from view by other things and empty areas often appear in unexpected places in the photographs.

I think that this unusual framing shows a concern for how things are placed in a town and how they relate to each other. Nothing is photographed in the center of a frame, as though it were by itself, because no building or object in a town can exist in isolation, independent of its surroundings. By looking at an area from a different vantage point than would normally be used and by including things in the frame that would normally not be included, Wittmar forces the viewer to consider buildings and objects, and even empty spaces, in relation to each other. In fact, it seems that it is the empty spaces that are the most important parts of many of the photographs. These empty spaces are the connective tissue of the town and hold everything together. The unusual vantage point of the photograph forces the viewer to see this. In viewing many of the photographs I found myself wondering why Wittmar had chosen to stand where she did, since it did not seem like the correct place to stand. However, I started to wonder why I should feel that there was a “correct” place to view things and why one viewpoint should be privileged over another. Why isn’t the view from beside, or behind something just as legitimate as the view from where one would normally stand? It is this view of a city that forces one to look at it in a different way and to see how objects that normally would not be considered together relate to each other.

Although Medebach seems bland Wittmar uses this indistinctiveness to show what these small towns that seem perpetually stuck between the past and present are like. The photographs appear to show a place that is in a process of change. Many of the pictures feature Tudor-style buildings that seem somewhat out of place compared to the strikingly bland newer buildings that are beginning to dominate the landscape. At first these old-fashioned buildings seem interesting, but after seeing many photographs of these buildings, it is clear very quickly how repetitive they actually are. In fact, the longer one looks through these photographs, the more alike all of the buildings begin to seem. Eventually it becomes clear that some buildings actually appear in multiple photographs, but from different angles. After a while, however, one begins to question whether certain buildings have actually been photographed more than once, or whether they are just similar to buildings that have already been photographed. The way the buildings begin to bleed into each other shows the repetitiveness of living in a small town where one has seen everything more times than he or she can count.