Dalliendorf Text
My first experience of Albrecht Tübke’s exacting photographic sensibility, and the quietude of his images, was seeing his Dalliendorf series. Dalliendorf is a small village in the north east of Germany where Albrecht Tubke came to live with his family when he was ten years old. When he re-visited Dalliendorf as an adult while studying photography at Leipzig University in the mid 1990s, the landscape, homes and people of the village seemed to him to have undergone only minor changes since his childhood. Returning to Dalliendorf created emotions in him that combined his present with his remembered relationship with this place. Aged 26, Tubke began making photographs in the village as a way of marking his dual experience – both remembered and current – of Dalliendorf. There is a level of detachment in the way in which Tubke chose to present the village and, in particular, the portrayal of the villagers. This approach acknowledges his position as a photographer stepping back into Dalliendorf. But what also emerged, for Tubke, was the realisation that this level of detachment had always been part of his relationship with this place.