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The vertical view by Bernd Uhde

Mallorca, October, 19 2018
Mallorca photographed from above BERND UHDE prefers to look at the world from above. For his landscape and city shots, the photo artist therefore flies into the air in a helicopter. This results in abstract photographs that are reminiscent of paintings. He has also photographed Mallorca from above.
TEXT   isla editorial office (bw)
PHOTO   Bernd Uhde

TAGS   Germans on Mallorca Art & Culture Santanyí

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Bernd Uhde is fascinated by the view downwards. The first time the photo artist consciously experienced this vertical view was in a hot air balloon. A primal experience, as he calls it today. "When you're standing on a precipice, you get this strange feeling in your stomach," says Uhde. "A primal instinct that tells us: one step further and you'll crash!"
The fascination of this vertical view has never left him since.
Since 2000, the 67-year-old has been photographing

Agricultural and urban landscapes from a vertical perspective. From hot air balloons, helicopters and airplanes. This results in abstract picture series that only become landscapes on closer inspection. They do not document, but are based on an artistic concept that he summarizes under the generic term "Airrealart". "Because they are vertical, the pictures lack the horizon that the eye is used to. That's why they are difficult to decipher," says Uhde.

"When you hang them, the viewer automatically looks for such a horizon. As a result, people start to engage with my pictures because they want to decipher them."
Bernd Uhde actually studied painting at the Werkkunstschule Düsseldorf and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Berlin. A little later, he studied directing and cinematography at the Film and Television Academy in Berlin. He then spent 20 years making documentaries.

Airrealart by Bernd Uhde

One day, however, he makes a movie about a balloonists' meeting in Italy.
When he climbs into one of the balloons, he has that primal experience. "I started taking photos and realized that the photos looked like pictures I had painted in the past. This brought me full circle after 20 years."

At some point, he shows his pictures to friends from the art scene. The first exhibitions, first sales and first book publications soon followed.
His photographs are always created within a conceived series of pictures. His Mallorca series was published in 2003. "Back then, a balloonist always took me to Mallorca from Manacor.

Mallorca's colors and structures are very different from those in Germany, for example. Much more fragmented and less geometric," says Uhde. That also fascinates him: how you can see from the air where a country begins and where it ends. How a society develops a structure. How you can draw conclusions about people from the air.

"On Mallorca, for example, the almond and olive trees are not cut down for the sake of a field, but simply plowed around them," he says. After numerous stints abroad, Bernd Uhde now lives with his wife on an old farm in the Lüneburg Heath. Many of his agricultural landscape pictures are created in this area.
Mallorca's colors and textures fascinate

Mallorca means pure relaxation for me

However, he still has a little house on Mallorca. He goes there about three times a year. But he hasn't photographed the island from above for a long time. "Every time I'm here, I think I should go again. But then I avoid it because Mallorca simply means pure relaxation for me."

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