Preview
MOORSCAPES – A VANISHING LEGACY
Wolfgang Bartels
Runs until May 24, 2004
Glenbow Museum
It was during a walk on New Year’s Day in 1981 that German photographer Wolfgang Bartels came to appreciate the unique beauty of northern Europe’s bogs. That beauty has been captured by Bartels in 50 colour prints now on display at the Glenbow Museum in the exhibition, Moorscapes – A Vanishing Legacy.
"I made a hike through the Meerhusen Bog at the Ewiges Meer (boglake) in East Frisia (North Germany) trying to get the alcohol in my body of the night before to evaporate in the fresh air, when I realized that the bog around me must look very beautiful in a better light condition," he says. "A year later I returned to that place and found it in the same dull light condition. On my third visit – it was on Easter Sunday morning in 1983 – I was successful and had the exceptional light conditions wished for."
Within three hours on that fateful morning, Bartels made 10 photographs that he now considers some of his best work. Ever since then, the Hanover-based photographer has continued to explore the mesmerizing bogs.
"I began photographing bogs in 1983 and continued for about five years," he says. "Then I photographed with longer interruptions for a further 15 years. At that time I was following up other themes, but reverted to the bogs from time to time as I cannot get rid of this special atmosphere of the bogs, and I am still under its spell."
Although it’s the remarkable beauty of the sites that keeps Bartels returning to take more photographs, the knowledge that the bogs are well-documented burial grounds for people believed to have been human sacrifices as long ago as the Iron Age and Roman era also plays a factor in his continuing fascination with them.
"It was mainly the eerie atmosphere of daybreak with its psychedelic trance light, or the demonic mood when autumn mists were hovering above the bogs, that got me under its spell right from the beginning," he says. "But this feeling was intensified by the knowledge that people who were sacrificed to the gods might be lying in the peat layer below my feet."
Today, many of those bogs are also under threat from mining companies who use heavy equipment to remove peat from the sites. Gardeners and commercial operations use peat to grow plants and flowers. The peat miners’ methods of extraction devastate the bogs, leaving no chance for further discovery of artifacts or human remains like the ones that make up the Glenbow’s primary exhibition, The Mysterious Bog People. Activists in Europe are also raising concerns related to the important role that bogs play as rich habitats for wildlife, including thousands of species of insects.
A photograph such as Fireworks in Ice is a powerful manifestation of one artist’s talent to forever capture the fragile beauty of these endangered places. Bartels’s photographs have been reproduced in books and calendars and toured in exhibitions, but sadly, their legacy may be to serve as the only comprehensive visual record of the bogs. It’s a point he laments even as he continues to document these rapidly vanishing places.
"I hope that the bogs will not completely disappear," he says. |
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