Photography in Skeleton Service
Airports across the world lay still and almost shut in 2020 and remain largely so now. In Germany, Berlin Tegel, once an important Luftbrücke into Berlin from the Cold War West, saw out its final days as a functioning airport in this quiet state. Tegel’s final days were, with it’s angular yet snug stairways and simple tubular walkways, like other airports worldwide at the time, near-empty of human life.
Photographers Robert Rieger and Felix Brüggemann took this opportunity to capture the hidden details of Berlin-Tegel ‘Otto Lilienthal’ Airport, an architectural child of the early 1970s, and the first major project of architects Volkwin Marg and Meinhard von Gerkan, the latter of whom is interviewed as part of the publication. As the authors of this astute new book attest in their publicity statement, Tegel sat quietly, “like a spaceship” last year, during its last moments as a functioning airport.
The book includes a range of interior and exterior shots of Tegel, close ups and wider landscapes. When making the images without the normal hustle and bustle, Rieger and Brüggemann have had the space to capture the smooth angles of check-in desks, the curve of a grey, wilting, Formica waiting room chair and the jutting roof tiles. An elegance perhaps missed before now is excavated, with the lines and bends of many stairwells, walk-ways and bus shelters shown in tactile closeups. It is these more or less abstract images which, in the selection presented in the publication, work best.
Alongside this, an aura of time having stopped is shown. Unshipped freight and clocks ticking for departures unlikely to happen are juxtaposed with near-sunset glow over West Berlin or burnt onto Tegel’s familiar exteriors or entrance hall floors. The images deftly capture the quiet “lightness” intended by the building’s architects upon design.
When empty, with just a smattering of flights ingoing and outgoing as the pandemic continued, Tegel looks larger than we may imagine when laid bare in the photographic image. The gentle bend of the drop off point of the so-called ‘drive in’ airport and hexagonal central terminal appear vast, tiny yellow buses at a standstill. The photographs of the burnt orange exteriors, meanwhile, are a nod to a colour palette belonging to another time.
This is an elegantly designed book; pictorially narrated in nostalgic hues to match the soft light of the images themselves. A tangerine conveyor belt strip sits on the grey exterior like a band wrapping up the story of Tegel inside. The images are laid out in a way which gives the book a unique architecture of its own, one which allows the viewer space to wander between the dips and folds of Tegel’s interior and exterior architecture as they glance across the wide pages.
The artists, in documenting the space, lauded in its heyday for a neat layout and efficient sizing, shown in its ghostly final hours in this way, have made an important contribution to mapping a visual legacy of the buildings. This alluring publication also includes an essay by Sophie Lovell, a perceptive summary taking us from the Cold War-era jet age into which Tegel was born, to our current times of global consumption, climate emergency, pandemic and total control. The book is a fond ode, as Lovell says, to “a beautifully designed, drive-in airport for a bygone age.”
__________
Reviewed for Photomonitor by Nicola Jeffs
Flughafen Tegel, by Robert Rieger and Felix Brüggemann was published by Pool Publishing, November 2020 in an edition of 500.
