Backround
I was born in East Berlin, growing up in the 1960s in a block of flats behind the Berlin Wall, where I was a self-taught photographer. Having qualified, I worked as a chemistry and biology teacher, devoting all my spare time to photography.
My improvised black and white darkroom was a refuge to me, a magical place, a timeless world. The language of my photography was grainy black and white street photography taken on my travels through Eastern Europe.
With the fall of The Wall in November 1989, my world expanded. In 1992, I received a grant for six months to teach German in a school in London and to learn English. I felt overwhelmed by the change and the unlimited opportunities it brought. I resigned from my teaching post in Berlin to stay longer in London.
While completing a BA in Photography at the University of Westminster in London in the mid-90s, my approach to photography changed radically: instead of capturing images, I began to create them. Experimenting with combining images using color and black and white negatives in the darkroom, I transformed familiar objects into photographs of magical dreams.
For my degree, I created a series of self-portraits through darkroom manipulation reflecting on the impact of growing up directly opposite The Berlin Wall. After college, I worked as a freelance photographer and became involved in a variety of creative and collaborative projects.
In 2001, my daughter was born, and in 2003, we moved away from London to live on a canal in Surrey where I taught photography and art in a local college.
Over the following years, I photographed my surroundings and observed their metamorphosis as they were reflected in the water.
Most of my photographs from 2014 to 2016 were taken on solitary walks. Restricting myself to the same route felt more like escaping into a thinking space. This process acted as a catalyst for triggering memories connected to my life in former East Germany. Writing these down was the beginning of keeping notebooks. Here, I collect thoughts about the past, my current photographs, and observations.
At the same time, my working methods have changed considerably. I am now using notebooks, my own photographs, multimedia, and publicly available data as starting points for reflecting on my experiences within society. The materials I use are selected for their cultural and historical associations. I create abstract images by obscuring parts of the original, and I am interested in the interplay between the private and the public. I am interested in the communicative function of knowledge and how it is controlled and open to manipulation.
My improvised black and white darkroom was a refuge to me, a magical place, a timeless world. The language of my photography was grainy black and white street photography taken on my travels through Eastern Europe.
With the fall of The Wall in November 1989, my world expanded. In 1992, I received a grant for six months to teach German in a school in London and to learn English. I felt overwhelmed by the change and the unlimited opportunities it brought. I resigned from my teaching post in Berlin to stay longer in London.
While completing a BA in Photography at the University of Westminster in London in the mid-90s, my approach to photography changed radically: instead of capturing images, I began to create them. Experimenting with combining images using color and black and white negatives in the darkroom, I transformed familiar objects into photographs of magical dreams.
For my degree, I created a series of self-portraits through darkroom manipulation reflecting on the impact of growing up directly opposite The Berlin Wall. After college, I worked as a freelance photographer and became involved in a variety of creative and collaborative projects.
In 2001, my daughter was born, and in 2003, we moved away from London to live on a canal in Surrey where I taught photography and art in a local college.
Over the following years, I photographed my surroundings and observed their metamorphosis as they were reflected in the water.
Most of my photographs from 2014 to 2016 were taken on solitary walks. Restricting myself to the same route felt more like escaping into a thinking space. This process acted as a catalyst for triggering memories connected to my life in former East Germany. Writing these down was the beginning of keeping notebooks. Here, I collect thoughts about the past, my current photographs, and observations.
At the same time, my working methods have changed considerably. I am now using notebooks, my own photographs, multimedia, and publicly available data as starting points for reflecting on my experiences within society. The materials I use are selected for their cultural and historical associations. I create abstract images by obscuring parts of the original, and I am interested in the interplay between the private and the public. I am interested in the communicative function of knowledge and how it is controlled and open to manipulation.