Centre d'art Nei Liicht - Galeries Dudelange 25, rue Dominique Lang 3401 Dudelange Luxembourg
In Eva Bertram's photographic art, the Madonna leaves the image. She steps out of it, and directs her gaze on the child. But the child looks back, a long time, before she realizes what this means: to revoke the directive of the other, and to integrate herself into the mesh of reciprocal terms. To see one another - the mother the child, the child the mother, the mother, who sees, how the child sees, how it looks at her, the child who sees, how the mother sees, that she is looked at by it, while it looks back at her - produces the looks of penetrating one another in the photographs.
It is the solemnness of one's own life, this view, which hits that of the beholders. The solemnness of this work of transformation on that discovered, from which each must draw on their own life that begins with play, in which the child feels his existence as do those who conceal themselves in the clothes of another.
The photographer circumvents it, in that she makes the object of the camera's view, that which is namely singular in its individuality, but is representative in the life typology of the situation: mother and daughter, sleeping, playing, eating, happy, rebellious and sad, the formative and hidden child will exist as life situation and as motif, as long as there are people. However this child is cooperating in the common redundancy of children's images, from the moment that a successful shot, in which it has begun, monitors the poetic game of staging the image of its life. Since then there is no photo that would not be co-designed and authorized by the child.
What Eva Bertram has undertaken, and continues to undertake, since the process begun, could only finally be completed when her daughter came of age--strictly taken only when, as an adult woman from her point of view, with images of the sense of her mother, she had answered this--and is one in its intensity and closeness, one of the most captivating documents of photographic art, aesthetics of image and cultural history as well.
Andreas Steffens