Instagram Takeover: Roger Eberhard

Roger Eberhard was born in Zurich, Switzerland and currently works between both Berlin and Zurich. He obtained his MFA from Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zürich, Switzerland and BFA in Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, USA.

His most series Human Territoriality, 2016-19, illustrates former border regions around the world and throughout the course of human history, that have shifted or no longer exist.

 

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Hi everyone this is @roger_eberhard taking over Photoworks’ account this week. Furggsattel, Switzerland Switzerland is a landlocked country surrounded by five countries: France, Italy, Austria, Liechtenstein and Germany. Its longest border is with Italy, measuring 782 km and running mostly across the Alps, ranging in altitude from 4,600 m above sea level (east of Dufourspitze) to under 200 m (Lago Maggiore), the highest and lowest points in Switzerland respectively. Long stretches (totaling 578 km) of the border in this mountain region run along watersheds between the two countries, including 40 km across glaciers. Due to global warming, the glaciers have shrunk considerably over the past few years, shifting those watershed boundaries. The melting of the massive Theodul Glacier below the Klein Matterhorn has displaced the corresponding watershed 150 m to the southwest, resulting in a small territorial gain for Switzerland, which was ratified peacefully by both the Italian and Swiss governments in 2009. So the top station of the ski lift to Furggsattel Glacier, Zermatt, which used to lie in Italy, is now in Switzerland – and the Swiss operators of the ski resort don’t have to pay rent to the Italians anymore. #photoworks_uk #rogereberhard #humanterritoriality #photography #instagramtakeover

A post shared by Photoworks (@photoworks_uk) on Oct 20, 2020 at 11:30pm PDT

 

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Hi everyone this is @roger_eberhard taking over Photoworks’ account this week. Rakaw, Belarus Rakaw is an urban settlement near the river Islach, 39 km west of Minsk, with a population of about 2,100. A person who was born in Rakaw in 1905 and remained in the village for 90 years would have had five different nationalities over the course of the 20th century. After being born in the Russian Empire and witnessing German occupation during WWI, the villager would have become a citizen of the Second Polish Republic in 1922 and of the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Rakaw was briefly occupied by the Third Reich in WWII. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the villager would have received a passport from newly independent Belarus. Poland, which was divided up at the end of the 18th century between Austria-Hungary, Prussia and the Russian Empire, ceased to exist as a sovereign state for 123 years, until it was reunited in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. This Second Polish Republic gradually extended its eastern territory through a series of wars with the Soviet Union. The Treaty of Riga from 1921 established its new borders and divided Belarus into West Belarus (Poland) and Soviet Belarus. Belarusian culture was consequently besieged on both sides of its inner border, subject to Polonization policies in the western part and branded as anti-Soviet in the east, where even Belarusian spelling was Russified. On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland from the west. And on September 17, 1939, only 16 days later, the Soviets marched in from the east, occupying West Belarus and putting an end to the Second Polish Republic. On that fateful day, Red Army tanks rolled past the border post at Rakaw and many Belarusian soldiers fighting for the Polish army died protecting their eastern borders. This circumstance continues to cause controversy today because, in the historical consciousness of many Russians, the war didn’t start until 1941. #photoworks_uk #rogereberhard #humanterritoriality #photography #instagramtakeover

A post shared by Photoworks (@photoworks_uk) on Oct 21, 2020 at 10:21am PDT

 

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Hi everyone this is @roger_eberhard taking over Photoworks’ account this week. Blythe Ferry, USA The Cherokee originally controlled roughly 100,000 sq km of the Appalachian Mountains in parts of present-day Georgia, East Tennessee and the western parts of North and South Carolina. With more than 300,000 tribal members today, the Cherokee Nation is the largest of the 567 federally recognized indigenous tribes in the country. President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, authorizing the government to extinguish Native American claims to lands in the Southeast. The forceful relocation of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Ponca nations to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma is known as the Trail of Tears. Estimates based on tribal and military records suggest that approximately 100,000 indigenous people were forced from their homelands at the time and that some 15,000 died during the long and strenuous march west. During the Cherokee removal in 1838, 9,000 Cherokee and 300 Creek were rounded up and imprisoned in stockades a few km east of Blythe Ferry in preparation for their forced journey west – a 1,600 km march – across the Tennessee River. It is believed that nearly two-thirds of the Cherokees who’d been driven from their homes stood on their ancestral lands for the last time at Blythe Ferry and that some 4,000 died in the internment camps, on the trail itself or later on due to disease. #photoworks_uk #rogereberhard #humanterritoriality #photography #instagramtakeover

A post shared by Photoworks (@photoworks_uk) on Oct 21, 2020 at 11:15pm PDT

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For more of Rodger Eberhard, click here.