Picture Series

It came when I was working on a reportage about a friend’s mother who has lived with multiple sclerosis for many years. We had gone on holiday together and were sharing a room at a youth hostel. At that time, Konny, my friend’s mother, was already in a wheelchair: her speech and motor movements were severely limited. While my friend was helping her mother wash early one morning, I started taking photos of her from the bed and asked her if that was all right. She said, “Yes, of course” On the evening of that same day – in the evenings, in bed, Konny could always speak much better – she told me that she actually felt uncomfortable because her disease meant that so many people had to see her naked, but that she had stopped caring so much because by that time, so many different care workers had washed her. I decided that there was no way I would use those photos. It was further proof of how difficult it is to decide to show other people’s suffering. It is an inherent criticism that I level at classic photojournalism.

The topic of my own experiences with sexual abuse as a child had accompanied me for half my life. Long before I even studied Photography or really examined that trauma, I already felt that someday I would want to speak openly about it. In psychotherapy sessions I noticed that that way of processing things wasn’t enough.

Then there were several coincidences and projects, for instance by Laia Abril, Mafalda Rakos and Arzu Sandal, that showed me how it can be possible to process a topic like that photographically and artistically.

I think journalism – both visual and written – will become even more diverse and interdisciplinary. This development has been clear for a number of years. Classic forms are being called into question and deliberately ruptured; various disciplines are being combined: there is no lack of courage when it comes to trying new things. The multifaceted presentation possibilities we have (online, books, magazines, public space) result in myriad possibilities to show projects and adapt them again and again to various surroundings and recipients. Social networks have reinforced a culture of individualism where the personal and subjective take centre stage, which is why individual fates are often perceived more acutely as representative of problems that affect society overall than are all-encompassing reportages that shed factual light on a problem with all its inherent factors. Personally, I’m a big fan of collaboration and I believe that in the future, different art forms will more often be interwoven as a way of telling stories. A lot of the time, visual language is not enough. Some things can be told better in illustrations or texts, others with video, painting or even sculpture. For me, visual journalism does not exclude any of these things.