"Afterword" from Up Against It:

Photographs of the Berlin Wall

by Leland Rice

Up Against It: Photographs of the Berlin Wall, 1991
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

"The wall gives its voice to that part of man which, without it, would be condemned to silence... the remainder of a primitive existence of which the wall may be one of our most faithful mirrors. Graffiti is our state of civilization, our primitive art..."
—Brassai, The Language of the Wall: Parisian Graffiti Photographed by Brassai (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1958)

My first encounter with the Berlin Wall occurred at about 10,000 feet (in the air) in the fall of 1983 during a weekend adventure that was hastily planned. Coming in by airplane to West Berlin, I had three opportunities for aerial views of the Wall. At first the brightly illuminated corridor along the Wall appeared to this night traveler like a long snake encircling a large homogeneous settlement. But by the third pass over the barrier I readjusted my quizzical gaze to observe the buildings as massed like a group of captives inside a fortress surrounded by the threatening beams from the floodlights on the east side of the Wall. Upon landing, I concluded that such a dramatic introduction to this city only partially prepared me for the immense physical reality of its definitive border, the Wall.

Early the next morning I ventured out to take a walk along the Wall. While strolling along a well-traveled dirt path I began to observe the many spontaneous messages and markings scribbled on its flat pitted concrete surface. Accumulated over many years, countless graffiti had turned the Wall into a semantic playground full of forceful messages. I gradually realized that I no longer could relate to the Wall as just a physically tangible medieval barrier symbolizing the ideological division of Europe. Certainly the Wall did exist for divisive reasons, but it now took on another purpose for me - that of creative catalyst. And, since walls had long been a primary subject of my work as an artist, I felt deeply compelled to photograph it.

Although the vast majority of the graffiti on the Wall was anonymous, we became the audience propelled into the same perspective as the unknown persons who provided the graffiti. We were also outside observers to the constantly changing imagery. The Wall was not a blackboard that gets erased regularly. Rather, the graffiti built to a crescendo of ever-elusive confusion. A rich pastiche of language and universal symbols coalesced to form a self-contained world. The essence of the writing on the Wall was best revealed by the energy that characterized the marks themselves. And, the essence of what I wanted to photograph was the profusion of images that spanned both popular culture derived from movies, television, and comic books, and abstracted figurative art forms.

The Wall also become a forum for wit and satire, and political sensibilities were often attacked through humorous graffiti on various levels of social critique. Most political messages I encountered were oversimplified metaphors playing upon an already awakened consciousness. They lacked visual profundity. However, the political significance of satire is pictorially evident in the image - where spread across the back of partially clenched fingers are the words, "Have you ever seen an antifascism protection wall? All that I want to know is on which side the Fascists are on so that I can be on the other side." The incongruity between the text (the graffiti) and the context (the Wall) addresses the nature of this satirical and poignant communication. For the East German government, the Wall was a "protection" wall constructed to defend the socialist state from the imperialists of the capitalist West.

Now, some eight years later, and after five photographic pilgrimages since I began this project, the Wall has been dismantled. Graffiti has become an authentic signature of our urban centers. Drawing and inscribing on public walls are universal impulses in human nature. My approach to how I photographed the Wall was, in a broad sense, much like that of an archaeologist. I visually excavated fragments of layered subject matter to penetrate these "pentimento" surfaces and unearth the potential meanings of what I feel are contemporary pictographs reflecting our time.

Leland Rice is an internationally exhibited photographer whose work is represented in major museums and galleries. Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Mr. Rice studied at the Arizona State University, the Chouinard Art Institute (Los Angeles), and the California State University, San Francisco. He has received a number of awards and fellowships for his work, and important one-person exhibitions include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution (1977) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1987). Museum collections include the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Mr. Rice lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.