"Eisenbahnhubbrücke Karnin Peenestrom"

Germany

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 lift bridge is the middle section of the Karnin Bridge, a former railroad bridge about 360 m long over the Peenestrom between the Pomeranian mainland and the island of Usedom near Karnin. The bridge structure was completed in 1933. The superstructures on both sides of the movable lift section were destroyed by the Wehrmacht in 1945 to stop the advancing Soviet troops. Since the end of the war, the lifting part of the bridge has stood as an unchanged fragment and as a technical monument in the middle of the river.