Dutch photographer Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk – a resident of Berlin since 1988 – takes us on a journey to the cities of the 21st century. The exhibition “UNITED CITY: Urban Portraits From Caracas to Shanghai,“ on view at the Studio of the Aedes Forum for Architecture am Pfefferberg, presents a selection of enthralling black-and-white and color photographs characterized by an ironic and socio- critical vision of our globally interconnected world. Portrayed in Ouwerkerk’s individual interpretations of urban environments are slices of everyday life, people, and architecture. His highly detailed and dynamic photographic narratives tell us stories about the built environment around the planet.
Appearing in Bauwelt in summer 1988 was a brief text and four black-and-white photographs of James Stirling’s Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin. The photos were the work of Ouwerkerk, who had just moved to Berlin from the Hague. Since then, he has worked for daily newspapers, magazines, and architectural books in the area of “architecture and the city as a lived environment” (to use old-fashioned 1980s terminology). Readers of Bauwelt are familiar with him in various roles: as an almost classical architectural photographer, one who always captures the object assigned to him subjectively, including the Netherlands Dance Theater in the Hague or an office building at Checkpoint Charlie, both by Rem Koolhaas. And as an ironic chronicler and bewildered guest at high profile architectural events such as the EXPO in Hanover, the MIPIM in Cannes, and the Venice Architectural Bienniale. And even as the photographer of the numerous subscription advertisements he has co conceptualized and seen through the execution.
I would even say that virtually no other photographer worldwide has produced such a wide-ranging oeuvre of photographic reportage. Most of his pictures were produced during the past 10 years for the city portraits he has published in Bauwelt. The individual series are as diverse as the cities they portray, yet a moral point of view and a recognizable approach make all of them unmistakably Ouwerkerk’s. His city portraits interweave imagination and discovery, their motifs always carefully considered without being composed beforehand. He uses the camera to capture ephemeral events, occasionally even driving clichés to extremes. His works are for the most part unserviceable as illustrations, for whether individually or assembled into series, they are narratives, strongly felt images of the characteristic traits of a given city in which the invisible, so to speak, the political, attains visibility: violence, the human mass, speed, authority. For this reason, they are decidedly realistic images, revealing slightly more than what is generally seen, a little more than what is generally known.
Felix Zwoch
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