Jörg Brüggemann’s Tres Viajes takes its title from three journeys to Chile and South America, but the book is not a record of itineraries. The photographer, a member of the Ostkreuz agency since 2009 and co-director of the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin, organizes the work into three chapters that differ markedly in design and materiality while remaining bound to one another. Across these sections he moves from landscapes and encounters made during a drive of several thousand kilometers to images of political unrest and demonstrations in Valparaíso. The visual language throughout seems less documentary than oneiric, filtered through feeling and recollection rather than reportage.
A dream of the photographer’s late mother prompted the first journey, and that origin haunts the sequence: these are travels undertaken as much in search of the self as through external terrain. A short personal text by Brüggemann extends the narrative mode into words, allowing the photographs and their accompanying prose to operate in the same register of open-ended reflection. Places, people, and political circumstances appear, yet the book resists fixing them into a single legible account, leaving room for the viewer’s own discoveries and associations.
The design by Lamm&Kirch, Berlin, is integral to the effect. Each chapter has its own material character, and the distinctions between them are part of how the book is read: as strands that cannot be fully explained at once. The hardcover volume runs to 140 pages with 82 illustrations and is published in German, Spanish, English, and French, acknowledging the Chilean subject matter while keeping the work legible to a broad readership.
For collectors, Tres Viajes matters because it complicates expectations of what travel photography can be. Brüggemann’s previous book addressed the German autobahn over several years, a sober and systematic subject; this new work turns inward without abandoning specificity. It proposes that a travel narrative might also function as a healing process, and that inner images can offer a singular, not always explainable approach to the world. Published by Hartmann Books in 2026 with an ISBN of 978-3-96070-138-5, the book is a considered object in which sequence, design, and personal writing are held in deliberate tension.
