Photographs by Ingo Bengelsdorf
Ingo Bengelsdorf lives in Berlin and is originally from the Uckermark region. This landscape has always captivated him, and with its understated yet charming character, it has long been the subject of his landscape photography.
Visits to and around Carwitz led Ingo Bengelsdorf to explore the life of Hans Fallada, thereby adding a new dimension to his landscape photography. These reflections gave rise to the series “Enchanted Splendor,” inspired by Fallada’s name for his Carwitz estate, which he acquired in 1933. It was here that Fallada experienced his most productive creative phase, marked by literary success and family happiness. At the same time, it was a period of deep personal crises and increasingly threatening social developments.
Through his photographs, Ingo Bengelsdorf seeks to trace Fallada’s “Enchanted Splendor.” In doing so, he deliberately limits himself to a monochromatic visual language. He keeps the digital editing process as minimal as possible and completely avoids the use of image-editing software. Instead, he experiments with double exposures, reflections, long exposures, and analog filters.
The result is quiet, sensitive images that capture something of the magic that characterized Fallada’s time in Carwitz—at the same time, a sense of melancholy hangs over the depictions, making the fragility of “enchanted splendors” visible and tangible to the viewer. Perhaps this can make the visible quieter and the invisible more palpable, as Ingo Bengelsdorf himself puts it.
