They have been digitally created since 2007, before that also in analogue form, but that is not so important for Carmen Berdux's photographs. Your pictures are only superficially understandable on and through the optical technology. Rather, their relationship to the depicted reality, in short, the view of what is represented is important. More precisely: the togetherness of the photographer and the subject, from which a torn, stolen, borrowed, passed or unintentionally awaited image emerges or remains.

 

Whether abandoned houses, legs, forests, seas or just things; Just as the photographic mechanics do not open up their images, just as little do they happen for the sake of the motif alone. Carmen Berdux's motifs are not sought-after, but found motifs that neither ingratiate themselves nor resist, they are there voluntarily and, as it were, encounter their photographer by chance. The word "serendipity", a term first used in the 18th century by Horace Walpole, fits best with this form of (accidental) finding, an idea that not only found its way into the planning of English gardens, but is still significant today . For example, when we leaf through a magazine, we often do so because we can find something we are not looking for. The media makers know this and are planning this "serendipity".

 

The image not sought, but found, genuinely opposes what is staged. There is therefore always something imperfect or provisional about it. But it is precisely in this that a form of instantaneous realism arises, which corresponds to thinking and feeling looking when experiencing. In the series, for example, of the abandoned houses in the divided old town of Nicosia, the images condense into a melancholy accusation of civilization. The beauty of the abandoned lies in the finding of the absent, in the silence, comparable to a musical pause in which the notes before and after deepen without being heard and still audible. Just like the Cypriot civil war that preceded the abandoned neighborhoods.

 

The other series of pictures by Carmen Berdux, such as the one about legs or trees, work with the same aimlessly targeted image finding that in the series becomes thought walks about nature, the body, war, time, ....

 

Erik Schmid