John GossageBerlin in the time of the Wall (SIGNED)

"But the legacy of Berlin on the work of John Gossage went far deeper. Berlin, one might say, is the place where photography became both easy and difficult for him. Easy because there was such a rich vein of subject-matter, history piled up in front of his eyes, one metaphorical layer upon another, like the different strata that can reveal so much to the archaeologist when a trench is cut through a site. But such strata, translated into the archaeologist’s sectional drawings, are notoriously difficult to read, and that, in a nutshell, was where the difficulty, the challenge lay for Gossage. He was faced with the task of evaluating the evidence, reading it, recording it, interpreting it, and fashioning it into a coherent ‘report’—both for himself and for his audience. Of course, as John Gossage is an artist, the ‘report’ may be oblique, poetic, metaphorical, subjective, and ambiguous. In short, it is a creative interpretation." (Gerry Badger, Berlin in the Time of the Wall)