We all carry our hurt with us wherever we are. But often going away, far away, allows us to see that hurt more clearly and feel it more fully. If we allow ourselves to do so we then might find a way to express it. If you’re a photographer that expression comes in the form of pictures.
As far as hurt is concerned, pictures are mute, though. How can you express your hurt with a tool that points away from you? Even if metaphorically speaking you think you see your hurt in the world, the resulting picture will merely be a stand-in for something that is so much more urgent and that, at the same time, other people will never be able to feel themselves (you cannot feel another person’s pain).
When I looked through Jörg Brüggemann‘s Tres Viajes, I encountered photographs that led me to feel that their maker wants to tell its viewer something with a sense of extreme urgency. It became clear quickly that the book is not about Chile, the country where the pictures were made over the course of three trips, but about the photographer himself.
This becomes clear and obvious in the fourth photograph in the book, a closely cropped portrait of a man whose kind of face photographers love taking pictures of. The man’s glasses are pulled up above his eyes to rest on his forehead. In the lenses you see reflected the photographer taking the picture and the environment the pictures were taken in, a graveyard.
There is a short and somewhat cryptic piece of text in the back of the book, printed on black paper in four different languages, that alludes to the hurt whose expression can be found in the preceding photographs. I found myself wanting that hurt to be expressed less obtusely in the text — and more obtusely in the pictures. But of course, I am merely a viewer and reader, and this is not my book.
Tres Viajes is a big step away from Autobahn, Brüggemann’s book about the one thing the German state will still pour endless amounts of money into even as the rest of the country is crumbling. As you can imagine, Autobahn is devoid of feeling: what is there to say about the roadways?
For better (as Germans would think) or worse (as the rest of Europe would think), Germany sees itself as this efficient country where the individual’s wants and needs have to step back, whether in public of private life. It took me many years and moving to a very different country to realize how much is lost by that approach, both on an individual and national level.
In a recent article about the late Joachim Fest, Vivian Gornick is struck by how the historian and journalist approached his autobiography, given the times he had to actually live through (the Fests were opposed to the Nazis but made it through the Third Reich mostly unscathed). “The grave, even-handed calm that pervades his prose is particularly striking,” she writes. And: “One appreciates the calm but is put off by the emotional distance.”
It is that emotional distance — not Fest’s but his own — that Brüggemann decided to discard and, honestly, this made for a lot more mature and intriguing set of photographs this time. As a viewer, you can really feel how the photographer is desperately coming to terms with his hurt that centers on his late mother.
And because it’s art the idea can’t really be to resolve things. After all, art does not live from certainty. Instead, if shows us that that certainty will elude us. The moment we think we have moved past something, another abyss might face us. Good art, in other words, does not provide any answers, and this book certainly does not.
I have no way of knowing whether Brüggemann found a way to reconcile the conflicting emotions that led to the making of Tres Viajes. I hope he did. But I don’t need to know, and neither does anyone else.
First and foremost, an artist needs to make their art for themselves. What they make then becomes a gift for us, the sharing of an experience that is not ours but that might become ours if we allow ourselves to see ourselves reflected in it.
This isn’t the right book for me to nitpick. Still, I wish this book were smaller. I imagine a smaller version being a lot more devastating to experience than this rather large book. It’s that German thing where if you have to tell somebody something important, then you really have to tell them.
It’s just that one’s private desperation and hurt do not become any grander if you scale up the volume of its expression.
Tres Viajes clearly is not only a big step for the photographer but also for its viewers, in particular its German ones. Discarding that emotional distance not only leads to more openness and honesty with oneself, it also offers a path towards more forgiveness.
And if there’s anything missing in Germany, it’s forgiveness. Instead, there is a strong strand of brutality that is increasingly displaying itself once again towards the country’s weakest: those who have the least, those who have fled there from dire circumstances.
The reality is that unless something changes drastically in Germany (which, alas, at the times of this writing seems unlikely) it might find itself in the situation Brüggemann traveled into in the middle section of Tres Viajes, which was photographed during a time of political unrest and violence in the streets.
Of course, there is only so much art can do to fix a nation’s problems. As I noted above, that’s not the role art can truly play anyway. Good art poses questions, and by posing questions it encourages its viewers to embrace and deal with the parts of themselves that are broken or hurt.
But being human means being hurt. The perfect human being does not exist. And if there were a perfect human being, then they would not be human any longer.
It’s a big ask, but I’m hoping that especially viewers in Germany will start to understand something from this book, namely that it’s OK to be hurt and that compassion and kindness (first for oneself and then, inevitably, for others) are to be embraced.
Only compassion and kindness offer a way forward.
The performative emotional cruelty that is being disguised as a detachment from one’s own emotions and hurt (as observed by Vivian Gornick) and that has been ruling Germany for much too long does not.
Tres Viajes; photographs and text by Jörg Brüggemann; 140 pages; Hartmann Books/Atelier EXB; 2026
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