Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Verena Brandt Muss ja. Und selbst? - Fragments of everyday life For many years I deal with the term of „daily life“ in my photographic work. More than exotic foreign countries or spectacular events I am interested in the small things in my surrounding. The allegedly familiar which is often taken for granted and doesn't get any attention. It seems to me that there is nothing more comforting for people than continuity and normality. Superficially seen, conformity is proscribed in our society. But in their actions and their way of living, people resemble themselves in a paradoxical kind of way. Apparently, they deeply yearn for solid structures and common rituals to manage their daily routine. In this series, I try to detect and examine these structures and rituals by capturing strange appearing situations from everyday life and thereby isolating them from their triviality. Combining the concentrated scurrility creates an exaggeration which questions the learned terms of „normality“ and „routine“. My photographs are not staged. They freeze a real found situation. This approach can be described as a collecting passion. A continuous search of absurd situations in totally ordinary surroundings. I don't follow a strict concept, but act solely intuitively. I find motifs at social events as well as coincidentally on the street in the sense of classical „street photography“. In doing so, a sort of „visual diary“ emerges. Despite the documentary method it is clearly not the reality which is only being reflected unfiltered by me. In fact, I don't think that photography can – or even should – accomplish that. It is my personal view. I relase the shutter to freeze a situation, and in a fraction of a second, it is already past. This tinning process of momentariness is what fascinates me till present and what I love about photography. Verena Brandt studied at the HAW Hamburg in the class of Ute Mahler and Vincent Kohlbecher. She currently lives in Berlin and works for magazines as well as on autonomous series in which she deals with the modern western society. Her work has been exhibited internationally and received several awards. verenabrandt.de