As child of a network administrator and an art therapist, I have always been fascinated by vulnerable situations and the bigger, societal picture in which they manifest.
With a background in Fine Arts and Anthropology, another focus of my work is to curiously walk along the disciplines‘ intersections while taking up the role of a documentary photographer. In my long–term projects I seek close dialogical engagement with people through listening, speaking, observing, and taking pictures.
Being close to others and getting to know new things is what initially brought me to photography; yet, picking up a camera to represent something else imposes an ethical and intellectual dilemma. Triggered by this conflict, I’ve been interested in collaborative and polyphonic approaches to create documentary work for a long time, which eventually resulted in a strong emphasis on dialogue and shared decision-making with the protagonists in all my projects about eating disorders.
I’ve also been observing the embarkment of my photographic work onto performative and film-based grounds. Since 2019, I started to appear in these videos myself – the photographer capturing a portrait, the anthropologist asking a question, the observer, the initiator, the attentive listener. By doing so, my focus rests on mapping out context, on fathoming a network of subjective impressions and information. To structure loose ends and bring everything to conclusions, I rely on tools from anthropology such as transcribing, coding and mapping out research questions in a spiraled epistemic motion.
In the past years, I’ve been investigating how persons affected by unstable mental health perceived the pandemic, and put my finger on encounters and deep-talk with strangers in the intimate setting in their car, asking them generic questions like „What do you think the future brings?“, „What do you hope society has learned from the past two years?“, and „How happy are you at the current moment?“. It is this deeper insight into our collective psyche and mechanisms of capitalist reality that I am chasing, a search for answers to be continued.
