What is ordinary when you are surrounded by the unfamiliar?

 

Seven years ago, I emigrated to Australia from Germany and began portraying our circle of friends and family in Brisbane, my husband's hometown. During a period when everything was new to me, photography became a way of approaching the unknown.

 

The project started out as a simple task that I had set for myself to maintain the practice of operating my large-format camera. Inspired by Thomas Struth’s family portraits, I asked to enter people’s homes. Together, we would decide where to take the photograph. The only instruction I gave was not to smile. What began as a technical exercise developed into a long-term series about belonging, perception, and the questions around ordinary life.

 

I photograph people in their immediate living environment: in their homes, on verandas, in gardens. The large-format camera significantly shapes my visual language. The slowed-down, focused working process creates a particular presence, both in me and in those being portrayed. The technical structure of the analogue process — the latent image — creates a productive uncertainty that inscribes itself into the photographs.

 

In this foreign place, my eyes sharpen for the smallest details. Everyday objects, architectural structures, gestures and glances come into focus. What interests me is not the spectacular, but the seemingly incidental. It is precisely in the renunciation of dramatisation that the complexity of life reveals itself. Each portrait gives a glimpse into a multifaceted, individual lived reality.

 

From the war veteran who served in Afghanistan, the single father of four, the former arts workers who found each other later in life, to the emergency physician who has just given birth to her first child — every person in this series carries an extraordinary story.

 

These are life paths shaped by ruptures and new beginnings, by challenges, achievements, and remarkable resilience. Lives in which care, loss, closeness, joy and adventure are distilled. And each of these people makes visible that, on closer inspection, every life is extraordinary.

 

Formally, I see my work in the tradition of Neue Sachlichkeit — New Objectivity. Like one of its most prominent representatives, August Sander, I understand the portrait as a precise and respectful observation of people in their social context. His method of making the dignity of the everyday visible and mirroring a complex social reality in each individual has lastingly shaped my way of seeing.

 

By portraying strangers turned into friends, I move between cultures. Although the foreign gradually becomes familiar, the outsider's gaze remains with me. And with it grows the awareness that the concept of an "ordinary life" is deceptive.