Initially, it was barracks of former Soviet troops that he photographed while traveling in East Germany from 1991 to 1995; then it was private houses that fell victim to open-pit lignite mining in the area between Cologne and Aachen.
Like a tracker, the viewer follows the photographer into the buildings, revealing the rather abysmal, bizarre views of a former life whose course and actors one inevitably imagines. The strongly cropped visuals do not embellish anything, appear "realistic" insofar as Berges makes use of daylight, and do not lose their sometimes surreal quality even when looking out of the window into a landscape that makes the departure of the inhabitants quite comprehensible. As tender and "human" as some rooms may seem, the next image from this inhospitable living space already appears rough and repulsive, where the uncertainty cannot be shaken off as to whether "in the past" (i.e. when the houses were habitable) everything was really better. Laurenz Berges presents sometimes bold compositions, for example when in Garzweiler the view out of the window ironically quotes the traditional metaphor of the picture as "finestra aperta", but at the same time the right edge of the window is cut off. It is precisely against this background that the vastness of the more than barren landscape, which has anything but a romantic effect, is sobering. Loneliness, emptiness, and melancholy are here for the basic features of a need that inevitably imposes itself on the viewer to come to terms narratively with what is shown."

Stefan Gronert: Die Düsseldorfer Photoschule – Photografien 1961 - 2008, Schirmer-Mosel, 2009, S. 41/42