Introducing the new gen of Berlin photography

This Friday sees the opening of the much-anticipated graduate show from the students of Berlin’s Ostkreuzschule for Photography. As ever, the graduates demonstrate a range of tastes and sensibilities, ranging from Finnish strength to the residents of Berlin’s Rummelsburger Bay, to boarding school students and intimate black and whites of friends and lovers. Below, we ask a handful of this year’s visionaries, what exactly inspired their work:

Hannah Schönwald – Memory foam

“The work Memory foam constructs a personal, associative network of memories and sends the viewer from the past to the present – and back again, so that the levels of time almost dissolve. The images, whether found or staged, jump back and forth between personal and collective memory.
My specific fascination with memories was released when stumbling upon Freud’s theory of screen memories and I soon realised the complexity and vagueness of the theory of memory. At the same time, I bought lots of negatives on Ebay and thus my project was defined: I wanted to find a way of visually representing this psychological subject: memory.”

“I’ve always had a certain and unfading fascination with subcultures – from German middle-class workers, dressing up as 18th century cowboys, spending their entire leisure time in a fake wild west village in the back yard of a farm, to a part-time dominatrix, paying their family‘s bills in unconventional ways. It was while having a coffee with a foot fetishist that I figured out that it‘s these contradictions that fascinate me the most about human behaviour. Wearing a buttoned up shirt for 50 weeks then literally nothing but a pair of sandals for the rest of the year. And it was this very touristic approach to naturism that I shared with my parents till the end of my childhood which made me curious to have a second look at this phenomenon after years have passed. With Zona Naturista, I‘m re-visiting my own infant holiday destination.”

“Freedom is not just a concept. It is a lived experience. BUCHT is about open space and urban transformation. In the Rummelsburger Bay in Berlin, the coveted excursion destination and prime location for exclusive residence, amplify phenomenas of current urban shifts. I tell a story about people who have found an unusual home in the Bay, both on water and on land. Plans for development, however, are about to change all that.”

“The work, The boarders has brought me into a world in which children adopt the role of adults through expectations and the values and traditions that exist in boarding schools. That made me reflect about my own childhood and what home means to me.”

“Jerusalem is still one of the most controversial cities in the world. The nine-year-old girl Hallel, being on the verge of childhood and puberty, is raised in an environment of a Jewish Zionistic family, while witnessing the periodically chaotic and dysfunctional coexistence of Israeli and Palestinian society. In this series, I try to capture the age between childhood and puberty, the juvenile time of becoming an adult. At this age, we are the most fragile, the body starts to change and we become aware of the society we are born into. We start to reflect on our social, political and cultural heritage, although still being dependent on our early experiences with our family and surroundings. Being a part of this world is a process—some will naturally grow into it and some will have questions about the world they become a part of.”

“To me, working creatively means trying to be honest with myself, even if that means displaying confusion, sadness and anger. It‘s all about looking inwards: questions concerning the self, sex, relationship, doubt, and intimacy. I’ve just turned 28—so all topics that have accompanied me in recent years. Perhaps, it can be summarised as questions about growing up.”