THE NIGHT

White Trash Contemporary presents Jerry Berndt’s “Nite Works" series – the second solo show of the award winning US photographer in Hamburg

Twilight, demimonde, nightlife. In his artistic practice Jerry Berndt was always attracted to the conditions of darkness. In his unique photo essays about Boston’s redlight distict (“Combat Zone”) or homeless people (“Missing Persons”) he documented the the dark underbelly of American society. But he also used darkness as a concepual frame for his “Nite Works”, an extrodinary series of night shots in deserted cities. These contrasty, carefully composed black and white images of downtown street corners, closed store fronts and illuminated shop windows, shot with long exposure and existing light, are reminiscent of classic photographers like Eugéne Atget and Brassai, but also bring to mind American photo realists like Walker Evans or Lee Friedlander. At the same time the images are prove of Jerry Berndt’s special sensibility for the social and political undercurrents of the situation. No matter if he gets into close contact with prostitutes, hustlers and pimps – carefully exploring the scene and quickly releasing the shutter –, or if he unhurriedly sets up his camera in a dark back alley in the middle of night, his photographs magically convey the specific atmosphere of the location. The fact that Jerry Berndt was closely watched and black listed by the FBI in the sixties because of his political activism and and opposition against the Vietnam war and was therefore more or less forced to his solitary night shifts, adds another dark dimension to these images.

“In his night images the city looks like an empty stage set and you don’t really know if it was abandoned by real people long ago or still awaiting them (...) You can see in these pictures that what they show is not inevitable fate but man-made misery – and if there is one criterion that distinguishes political photography from the doleful black and white mood shots plentiful available at poster shops, then this is it”, German art critic Niklas Maak wrote about Jerry Berndt’s work (FAZ, 15.2.2009). It was presented to a wider audience for the first time in Germany in two highly acclaimed exhibitions at Museum für Photographie Braunschweig and C/O Berlin. Maik Schlüter, director of the Photo Museum in Braunschweig who organized the show, discovered Jerry Berndt at the gallery White Trash Contemporary. In the catalogue he writes about the “Nite Works” series: “The absence of any kind of activity allows him to concentrate solely on the light conditions, the atmosphere and the architectural stucture of each situation. Although this central work exhibits clear references to photographs by Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Ed Ruscha, or, in a further historical arc, to Walker Evans and Eugéne Atget, Jerry Berndt’s focus is less on the conceptual or typologizing element and more on a psychological state of emergency and a specific, symbolic nighttime mood.”

The exhibition consists of xx photographs from Jerry Berndt’s “Nite Works” series, among them “historic” images from Boston, Newport and Warsaw in the seventies and more recent night shots from Paris, Berlin and New York.

Jerry Berndt was born 1943 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For more than 30 years he has built a career as a documentary photographer with series on the genocide in Ruanda, civil war in Haiti und homeless people in the US. His pictures are published in major publications in the US and Europe, i.e. the New York Times, Newsweek und Paris Match. His work won major awards, i.e. grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the University of California.

In February 2007 Jerry Berndt had his first solo exhibition in Germany at White Trash Contemporary. This led to much noticed museum shows at Museum für Photographie Braunschweig (September 2008) and C/O Berlin (December 2008 to March 2009) and the publication of a comprehensive photo book, “Jerry Berndt: Insight” (2008), by the Steidl press.

Jerry Berndt’s photographs are represented in the collection of major museums like the MoMA in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Bibliotheque National. He is also in the collection of Sir Elton John. He taught photography at the Art Institute in Boston and at Univeristy of Massachusetts. Today he lives with his wife and son in Paris, France.

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