"Geertruidenberg Bergsche Maas"

Netherlands

pigmentbased inkjet print

In the summer of 2020, the Cologne-based artist Boris Becker photographed all bridges on a nearly two-month trip with his boat over the inland waterways of Europe from Holland to Poland. The 650 bw motifs are not put into a typological comparison in a traditional sense, but presented in a chronological and topographical sequence in an extensive publication with 1296 pages. Following the concept of a photographic road movie and mostly taken from the middle of the water, the images show a vast variety of bridge structures from the last 150 years. At the same time, despite their diversity, the individual images seem to merge into a single shot due to their visual similarity.

The Bergsche Maas, also Bergse Maas, is an artificial tributary of the Meuse between the municipality of Well and the town of Geertruidenberg in the Dutch province of North Brabant, created in 1904. The Meuse divides at Heusden into the Afgedamde Meuse and the Bergse Meuse. The Afgedamde Meuse flows north to its confluence with the Waal, the main branch of the Rhine, forming the Merwede, while the Bergse Meuse continues west as the main branch of the Meuse. Part of the Merwede joins the Bergse Meuse to form the mouth of the Hollands Diep.