Review of 'Liebeslied' by Rut Bless Luxemburg. -Nicola Bayes.

Rut Bless Luxemburg is well known for her investigations and exploration of the urban landscape. She produced a set of photographs named Liebeslied, or Love song, and was first exhibited in London in 2004. Luxemburg studied photography at London College of Communication and gained her last formal education at the University of Westminster.  

The resulting works of  ‘Lovestory’ are quite lonesome yet beautiful, some being instantly recognizable and some being almost abstract. Her long exposures allow her to use light eliminating from the streetlights, which I feel creates a searching feel to her photographs. There seems to be no sequencing to the photographs as the dates are not in order, yet I feel Luxemburg may have set the sequence to what she felt works best which creates a sort of journey throughout her monograph.

Accompanying these images, Alexander Garcia Duttmann adds a page of text for each Image, calling these ‘my suicides’. They seem to be a story, which describes Luxemburg’s photography within the scene. I found this quite strange considering the viewer flows through the images like they’re on a quest to find something, making their own story along the way, only to be hit with a rather large explanation.

There is no introduction to Luxemburg’s ‘Liebeslied’ and each image is set on there own page with a large which boarder, the only text being the plate number, and the year it was taken. I feel this adds to the sensation of searching and isolation of the photographs, making them more intense and foreboding. When admiring this book, I felt as though I was taking a journey through the unknown, on a quest to find something through the portals and gateways within it, and almost feeling lost when the images end.

After reviewing Luxemburg’s ‘Liebesied’, I felt as though she had taken me on journey, which was intense, enticing and somewhat distorted. I have never come across Rut Bless Luxemburg’s work before but I feel I will have to take a look into her work more often.

 Rut Bless Luxemburg,  2001, Liebeslied, Black Dog Publishing ltd.