Wohlstands­traum / Nuclear Family

A Photo Essay by Kermit Berg 2009–2011

Kermit Berg

American painter, printmaker, graphic designer, and conceptual artist Kermit Berg (born 1951) has focussed on digital photography since the 1990s. His works in series are made in very small editions and often as original pieces.
In Wohlstandstraum / Nuclear Family, inspired by letters exchanged in the 1950s between his father and a family from West Berlin, Berg creates an intimate portrait of the ties between people from different nations during the Cold War. In this juxtaposition of letter excerpts and other artefacts with texts of his own and brilliant shots of designer objects of the time, the elegant world of objects stands for a universal dream of modernity, cleanliness, and prosperity.
Berg transposes his family history into the present through associational representation, leading viewers to ponder German–American friendship, personal and social values, and the ways in which these can be threatened. As in Berg’s architecture-based photo series, the works shed a light on aesthetic achievements and utopias of a past era that reverberate to this day.