Peter Rathmann. Going Up The Country
“I'm going up the country, baby, don't you wanna go? “I’m going to some place where I’ve never been before”, are the first lines of what is probably the most popular song by the US band Canned Heat, released in 1968 on the legendary album “Living the Blues”.
20 years later: Inspired by this mobilizing song, Peter Rathmann DGPh, known as one of the best still life and food photographers in Germany, is taking his own road trip through the USA. Without being commissioned by an agency or print medium, but purely out of personal artistic motivation.
Photographic road trip through 34 states of the USA
Over a period of 18 years, he traveled through 34 states, carrying a Hasselblad medium format camera, a Gitzo tripod and a lot of black and white film. He captured images of old wooden houses and interiors, street scenes and automobiles in extreme detail, mostly photographed in rural areas and on the outskirts of large cities.
At first glance, Peter Rathmann's photographic findings from his travels across the USA seem as if they had accidentally fallen into the viewfinder of his camera. In fact, the Rendsburg native, trained by the highly precise planning of his commissioned work in his home studio, did not let himself drift randomly on his journeys through the "land of unlimited possibilities", but carefully selected his locations after researching on site.
“People would not strengthen the image content”
His USA portfolio has a subtle, sometimes enigmatic effect that is difficult to escape as a viewer. One would almost think that some of the locations photographed are crime scenes or sets from a film noir. But only two of his photographs depict people. In an interview, Peter Rathmann said:
People would not strengthen the image content. I deliberately leave them out of the images. A concrete depiction of people would only distract from the image compositions and content. But everything that these images show is ultimately the work of man.
www.marlowes.de/going-up-the-country/
Exhibition “Going Up The Country” in Hanover
With his objective visual language, Peter Rathmann follows in the continuity of important artists such as Walker Evans and Edward Weston from the 1950s and Bernd and Hilla Becher from the 1970s. Rathmann does not explicitly adapt any photographer, but rather develops his own subjective, documentary style.
Due to the daily volume of his commercial projects in the studio, the negatives from his trips to the USA remained untouched in the depths of his image archive for decades. It was not until 2021 that Peter Rathmann began to unearth the treasure and systematically digitize the images with the Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED, the world's best film scanner.
The results are now on display for the first time in the exhibition “Going Up The Country” at the Gallery for Photography (GAF) in Hanover (13 February to 23 March 2025).
