Uferspaziergang
It has taken me 32 years to get around to digitizing the negatives from my days as a photographer at the Human Geography Institute at the University of Basel, Switzerland, where I worked from April 1993 through April 1994. My main project there was participating in a book called “Uferzone: Stadträume am Rhein in Basel,” which roughly translates as “Riverside: Urban Spaces of the Rhine River in Basel.” It started off simply as a list of buildings to photograph and gradually evolved into a book project that included many contributors. The book included many of my square black & white photographs, including a long “photographic essay” called “Uferspaziergang.” This translates as “A Stroll Along the Banks of the River,” but for short I call it “River Walk.” At the time I saw the project more as an opportunity to explore with my camera, to see deeply, and to compose a visual poem of sorts - a document of intimacy. I still see it that way. The poet William Carlos Williams described that sensibility -
“…tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital if events themselves, but solely from the attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance by giving them thus a full being.”
The sequence of the images here conforms somewhat to the original sequence in the book. Some of the images from montages on the themes of river access, forbidden zones, the port, and a doomed rustic bath house, along with many outtakes have been integrated. A few images have been deleted. This version of the work includes 14 more images than the book. In filmic terms - this is the Director’s Cut. I have tried to keep the rhythm of presenting the images as couplets. This manner of sequencing was utilized originally to eliminate blank pages and economize printing costs, but it also gave continuity and helped the work flow. The river is like a book insofar as one never sees the whole thing all at once. One can’t know the whole river except as an idea. The sequence begins upstream at the locks and, with a few exceptions, moves mostly along the more industrial and less wealthy eastern banks of “Klein” or “Little” Basel, up to the port on the Swiss / German border. It continues the opposite direction, moving from the Swiss / French border back upstream along the western banks. I estimate that I did that six mile walk about thirty times over three months, with a Hasselblad and two lenses in tote. Two diptychs and a triptych from Uferspaziergang can be viewed in the Diptychs and Triptychs gallery of this website.
In 1994 I wrote an essay that preceded the main body of photographs in the book. This concluding excerpt sums up where my head was at:
“In mythical and spiritual literature as well as folk and pop songs the river is a metaphor for life; an energy channel which feeds and is fed by all that surrounds it. Crossing to the other shore is regarded as the aim of every aspirant on the path, meaning, in short, to wake up from ignorance, recognizing the interdependence of all things disposing of the mistaken substantiality and inflexibility of all phenomena and events. The river flows; just like the mind it never stops. Eventually emptying into the ocean and rising again into the sky… it even passes through Basel. A photograph or group of photographs is not exactly a metaphor, although it may function like one insofar as it exerts a descriptive force which in certain contexts does expand within and upon the experience and imagination of the viewer. The point is that words evoke mental images, and photographs can act as a cause to manifest words, concepts, emotions, and projections, however, they are not equal. This book is filled with many pages of facts, information, ideas, history, and plans concerning the geography of the Rhine. I am grateful that some space has been allowed for a block of photos which are not always purely journalistic, but rather as a whole seek to resonate with the ‘Erhebung without motion’ made explicit in T.S. Eliot’s poem Burt Norton.”
I am grateful to the folks at the Geography Institute of Basel for giving me the opportunity to make this work. In particular, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. W. Gallusser, Matthias Bürgin, and Francis Rosse. At the time I made the work I was looking a lot at the photographs of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Their influence played out in this series as tough and gentle pictures in a documentary style.