Longing to belong
I saw tiredness and pain, and I saw longing.
The sun flickered into my face
and I asked myself if sometimes homelessness
doesn’t begin right there where you were born.
2017 I was invited to Valparaíso, a seaport in Chile, to take pictures of migrants.
I didn´t know anything about Chile and nothing about Valparaíso. Walking around the streets, I found them crowded with people. This was very different from home. At times I asked passers-by, if I might take a picture of them, and most of the time they agreed. Their lack of distrust surprised me.
I didn´t know what I was looking for, I just reacted to what I saw and what I sensed, just to find out later what it was all about, and it was, as always, also about me.
Marie lives up on the hill in a house without water and electricity. In the evenings it can get really cold here. The sea is a long way down. Marie´s grandparents hail from Germany. She is proud of her heritage. The pictures of her grandparents bear the signs of a time long gone away.
Marie´s husband Pedro comes from Peru. His skin has a greyish black tone. It is, as if he would be ashamed of his color. When Pedro became eight years old, his parents sent him away from home. From then on, he lived on the streets. Once in a while he brought back home his earnings. Pedro never learned how to read and write.
There is a wide gap between photography and the reality it depicts.
Dumb and deaf it can´t bridge this gap because it sticks to the surface of things.
Photography fails, when confronted with social reality.
It knows nothing about cause and effect.I photographed the dust in the roads, and I photographed the palm trees. I photographed the pelicans at the harbor, and the shadows on the wall.
I was looking for a language that would mark my photographs as photographs, as not to be confused with reality.
