As is well known, mass unemployment followed, rather than a job miracle; the short-lived gold-digger mood soon gave way to an economic standstill.
But Christian Wolter was not interested in recording the decline of East Germany. The places he found could be in any other European country. His pictures, distanced and sometimes strangely uninvolved, tell stories of what happens when major projects literally run out of steam: spoil heaps tower up against a backdrop of untouched nature, tree stumps are a reminder of a regional airport that was never realised and the remains of pavilions quietly rusting away are left over from Expo 2000 in Hanover. Wolter photographed them head on, without people, usually in landscape format and often under grey skies – his pictures, even though they are photographed in colour, continue the Bernd and Hilla Becher tradition. The failures depicted here are not always total and final; often Wolter simply shows intermediate stages in a long process of change. Occasionally he also records the remarkable U-turns that development projects can make: a chip factory costing 275 million in Frankfurt an der Oder stood empty for years, until a solar cell manufacturer took it over instead. And it is well known that airships are not serviced in the largest column-free hall structure in the world, but day and weekend trippers enjoy the delights of a tropical water park.
And public projects do not get off lightly either: Wolter shows a future high-speed rail track that will probably not be finished until the second half of the century at the current rate of construction, and an abandoned open-cast lignite mine that was first planted with trees and then flooded. But despite its theme of failure, Wolter’s Blossoming Landscapes does not only deal in sadness: in retrospect, the megalomania manifested in large numbers of projects seems almost amusing. Of course this only works for as long as the idea of their consequent economic and ecological costs is ignored.
Perhaps the most important insight from Wolter’s book is that the projects could probably be photographed again in 50 years time – in other places, but with the same results. The fact is that ultimately Blossoming Landscapes are nothing more then the sometimes inevitable and sometimes wilfully induced frictional losses that all our striving for growth and progress brings with it.