GEORGE TATGE photographer

Tatge's images transmit the emotion of both a personal and an absolute discovery, as well as the desire to seize it for himself and to communicate it to others. It is the miracle of how Dutch painting can become a form of knowledge, as Svetlana Alpers refers to in her famous book, The Art of Describing. A miracle that goes beyond the mere geographic specificity which it so often evokes. The sense of geographic discovery which Tatge's images transmit is witness to the dialectic between art and science which, through chemical and physical mechanisms, is at the root of photography. Discovery is surprise. Tatge will occasionally reveal this by noting, in surrealistic ways, the incongruities that a photographer can encounter. Objects of solitude and estrangement break the isolated contemplation of the wandering photographer and help him to retrieve an innate sense of irony and enjoyment before the surreal show which the world has to offer him. Tatge puts these stories on stage with measure and with delicacy, never denying the fact that these are objects of the past which time has bequeathed us, as driftwood on the seashore. Events of passage and of transition, like the relics, the ruins, the remains of incompleted works, that his photographs capture in images of meditated equilibrium.

Carlo Bertelli, 2004