Katrin Koenning’s photographs attack us with the full force of emotion. She says of herself that she cannot be still. She is so right: her photographs speak, whisper, scream, abduct, dig deep and possess the narratives of stories. They are truths about people, love and, above all, herself. A Journal.
Katrin Koenning: I find myself searching, because how do you manage to translate these big words like ‘love’ and ‘distance’ into an image? With the sense of a lived history, there is a negotiation with what is still there, with what has not been worked on. Is it possible to represent love? This question runs throughout all my work. In order for me to start anything at all, I have to feel close to it. I have to have a connection and actually feel this ‘core’ of love. It’s a feeling that underlies everything and it doesn’t matter if it’s about people, my cat, the mountain, the forest I love or the ocean. This may sound a bit abstract, but I think it has a lot to do with the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of looking at things. We are surrounded and flooded by images, and our head decides and classifies something every second. The everyday – all the things that we see over and over again and that lull us like a thick cloud. Collectively, we have a tendency to write things off and forget to look.
And looking is an active decision. The moment I decide to look, I break this pattern of having seen a thousand times before. I fall out of the door and basically everything is new every day, too. It’s my way of being in life and yes, it’s also a privilege to accompany something over time.
Something that is always there is never exactly the same.
I am aware that my approach is not always understood, but I don’t claim to always be understandable. My photography just tries to create a certain emotional space that challenges, breaking the boundary between love and distance. I try to exhaust all the possibilities given to me. I have been photographing for more than 20 years and have acquired certain languages and ways of working. But the most wonderful thing is that so much remains intuitive and unpredictable. My own life story, and all the experiences I’ve had, creep into each of my works. There I am again with that idea that I cannot hide my love in the moment. Each photo is a very big part of me and it almost doesn’t matter what I look at, it always resonates. Consciously or unconsciously, every photo, every series, tells my story. When I am alone with myself in nature, there are often also quite confrontational moments. In Australia, for instance, I feel as if I am walking with white feet on stolen land. Documentary photography can really achieve a lot, in that sense, with all these ‘negotiations’ – the encounter one has with oneself. It is so much more affecting; it’s able to bring us together and enlighten us. It’s always about the how of a look that is then captured in a photograph. Something I’ve really never understood is the idea of photographic distance. For me, it doesn’t work. The photographic act is the attempt to get closer. For me, it means allowing attraction and the ‘unleashed’. For example, there is a photo of my friend Tobias’ hands enclosing a fire. It was through Tobias that I got into photography. It is one of the few photos I have taken of him. He crashed over Iceland shortly after we graduated from high school. This photo tells my story – a love story – but it can also become another story through another’s gaze. Patti Smith once said that “love is stronger than death” – and it’s true.
Very often, people ask me when a work is finished. When I think of Lake Mountain (2010–2018), a series that lasted nearly a decade, I recall a restlessness in me wanting to finish this story. Isn’t that a natural process in our lives anyway, to feel the end of something and then not be able to escape it? A story is told – my story is told – and yet that is not a real end. I will continue to love the place, the mountain, and it will call me and attract me. And every now and then I take photos because it is my way of approaching the moment and belonging to it.
So it’s a story that comes to an end, but I walk out of it into a ‘progression’, into something that remains and will forever be a part of my life. Graduations are endings, but they are inscribed in our past. Another example is Dear Chris (2012–2013), because in that work it was clear from the beginning that there was a concrete narrative frame because of his suicide. [NB: The series concerns the death of Koenning’s cousin’s husband]. But that’s by the by, and here I am changing perspective again, the face of life. Stories that frame us like this demand processing and I face it through my photographs.
When you practise photography the way I do, it’s primarily about the act of the image, what it does to me in the world and in the connection between us. Through photography, I get to look into incredibly moving stories and truths that are shared with me, of which I become a part and in which I discover my place. Photography is daily life. Photography helps us see from different perspectives and realise that everything carries multiple truths, everything is connected; we recognise beauty, feel enchantment, and through that we can make love visible at all times.
Katrin Koenning grew up in Bochum. At age 23, she relocated to Australia where she studied photography at the Queensland College of Art, Brisbane. This act of relocating came to influence her work. Concerned with love and distance, her images deconstruct the emotions behind absence and longing, insisting that the space in between is not a void, but a new destination. Her work is shown widely both in Australia and internationally, in many solo and group exhibitions. She currently lives in Melbourne, where she lectures in photography.
As featured in SLEEK 72 – LOVE. Available in Print or Digital here.