All photos are pigmented fine art prints

Size 34 x 34 cm, edition 5 + 1 AP €  850,- (incl. frame and VAT)
Size 75 x 75 cm, edition 5 + 1 AP € 1800,- (incl. frame and VAT)

Contrast

“That was a terrible time! On the night of 24/25 July, Hamburg was bombed for the first time. My department, the Eppendorf University Hospital, was destroyed, as well as my house in Elise-Averdieckstraße. Everything was destroyed here, my collection and library. […] Now I ended up in a small farming village near Halle, where I put up my wife and little grandson. Now everything is gone, my whole life’s work is destroyed! But I will certainly start again, and it will be built up better than I had before. As a sign that I am ornithologically unbroken, I want to tell you that on my arrival here I immediately examined two nests of Hirundo rustica and found that they were sitting on weakly incubated eggs – per nest with 4 eggs. This is just to show that I am still fully awake.”  Moebert to Schönwetter, 4 August 1943

The selected passages from the correspondence provide a highly subjective view of history: events described from the point of view of a group of oologists and ornithologists. It is a reconstruction of the past from this remarkable perspective. The selection of eggs from the collection is similarly subjective: most of the eggs were selected because of they were mentioned in the correspondence: thus creating a link between eggs and history, the drama that resounds from the words of the ornithologists is translated into how the eggs are portrayed.

It is the drama of a world of contrasts, a world of black and white, with little room for nuances. Instead of documenting the eggs in an ‘objective’ way, where they are evenly lit and photographed with a ruler that indicates the size, my approach deviates from this traditional image. The colours of the egg shells, which are very prominent in various bird species, I have strongly reduced in the majority of the eggs. This makes the eggs equivalent to each other, because, similar to the ‘choir of oologists and ornithologists’, I am not concerned with an individual egg and the characteristics of the species, but with a select group of eggs linked to historical narratives. By placing the eggs in a dark environment, they are stripped of any sense of size. The lighting with great contrasts against a dark background also links up with the drama that comes through in the correspondence.