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Paradise Lost and Found

“Paradise lost and found” uses photography to investigate industrial architecture in the landscape, depicting the remains of industrial sites and allotments in the former East Germany. The photographs represent sites as if they were relics, exploring Walter Benjamin’s idea that the nihilistic character of the modern era turns everything into a ruin or collectable fragment. The photographs document a personal journey through a series of images which can be read with multiple meanings: portraits of places redolent with the secret lives of the people who live and work there.

Positioning herself in the field of photography in relation to Brecht’s observation that a photograph of the Krupp factory reveals nothing about its social reality, Andersen takes up Benjamin’s suggestion to build the image up through a series, adapting this pictorial method to comment on the construction of history and the representation of the past. In this, her work refers implicitly to other artists who have engaged critically with the way German society has sought to represent itself such as conceptualist documentary photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, and the writer W.G. Sebald.

Supported by an ACE grant, the book’s introduction by historian and curator Gabriela Switek, delineates the historical context of the work and its relationship to others’ work in this area such as Mark Power’s “The Sound of Two Songs” and Wim Wenders’ “Places strange and quiet”.

It was among the ‘Favourite Photography Books of 2009’, nominated by Sue Steward at theartsdesk.com, reviewed by Bill Kouwenhoven for Hotshoe Magazine. Images from the book appeared in the RA Summer Exhibition, 2009 and Art Now Fair, Miami, 2008. Photographs from the book appeared at the Focus Festival, India 2013 and inspired “The Train”, exhibited at Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) USA. 2013.