Jörg Müller

Alle Jahre wieder saust der Presslufthammer nieder

«Ich möchte weder Moralist noch Lügner sein. Dass die Probleme der Umweltzerstörung nicht beim Papierchen auf der Strasse liegen, weiss doch heute jeder.»

«When I worked on these pictures over 35 years ago, it was not my intention to indoctrinate children. Much rather, I wanted to make visible for their parents – without judgment – what our generation experienced first-handed in the uninterrupted period of belief in progress,» says Jörg Müller about the new edition of his prints, which brought him international recognition in the Seventies and for which he was awarded the German Youth Literature Prize in 1974.
In seven large-format pictures Jörg Müller documents the gradual cementing of the habitats of the Fifties. The prints show how thoroughfares are developed, agriculture is industrialised, houses are built and torn down. Compression wherever one looks. In the first image children are playing by a stream and on a meadow, in the last image nothing remains but a sandpit. Just as in «busy picture» books, every image reveals numerous details, and many motives recur time and again.
Müller refrains from commenting and forgoes making any suggestions as to how these developments could be arrested. This makes up part of the strength of his images, whose message is more current than ever.

(Berenice Geser, trans. by Simon Froehling)

Source: SIKJM

Translation of title: Every Year the Jackhammer We Hear, or: Modified Landscapes

Sauerländer, Aarau 1973

ISBN: 3-7941-0218-5