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.

href="https://dergreif-online.de/www/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/img026-retouch.jpg"> It was around the time of the 20th anniversary of my mother’s death that I decided to embark on making a film that would explore her drowning. My father had recently passed away and we had put off talking about everything that had happened during that period—an epitome of that very British sensibility of inexpression in the face of that which can not be named; the inexplicability of voicing emotions. Although far from being a trauma of repression, her death had been very present all my life, but it was something that I had largely internalised, that is to say it lay just beneath the surface, lining and becoming a part of all newly found experiences to come. The death of a loved one to a child has the curious effect of fucking you up, and making you harder, more perceptive, and irrevocably different, all at the same time. It unlocks in you a totally different sense of the world—and I mean that in real terms, not in some loftily, rhetorical sort of way—and shows you that death is not some abstract far off unfathomable thing, but rather that it is something tangible and real, something very present, something that can happen. You realise you are living and breathing and it encourages you, too young perhaps, to start figuring out what it is you’re doing in the world. At such a tender age you don’t necessarily understand all of this in these terms; it all tends to show itself in way more destructive, unreasonable, and unproductive ways. Nevertheless this experience shapes you—like those big, game-changing experiences do—and determines, in a very decisive manner, everything that presents itself thereafter. After my mothers death we spent our summers in rural Germany, at my Oma’s house in the village where my mother had grown up. My relationship with this place is that of the intimate outsider. I know every corner of it, I can still smell the deep red tomatoes growing, and the way the soil felt in my hand when I would unearth them over the floor. I’ve explored this place for countless hours on bicycles as a child, and later with a camera and a video camera. By all intention I was going to make a film that explored the shared sense of memory that we as a family shared. I wanted to find out exactly what had happened before the people who had lived through it were no longer able, or were no longer there to tell the story. I was really into Werner Herzog’s documentary-style of filmmaking at the time (still am), where he overlaps interviews, with history, storytelling, and his own peculiar narrative driven style. I wanted to make a talking heads kind of film, quite straight, but tap into that kind of “ecstatic truth” that I believe Herzog coined. I think I made thirty plus hours of footage over the course of the year, interviewed all relevant parties, asked uncomfortable questions, and got some answers. I even took a road trip with my good friend Oli to Zandvoort, in the Netherlands where in February 1993 they had found her body. We travelled there on the 20th anniversary, and I went down on the beach at dawn, approximating where I thought she might have entered the water, expecting to feel something, my video camera pointing out to sea. But when you go out looking for such moments, when you force things too much, you don’t tend to feel that thing you’re seeking… When this didn't feel like enough I even went so far as to visit the local police station to dig up some records, but her case predated computer entries, and the paper files would be near-impossible to go back through now, as no one had organised them they hadn’t been digitised—“its so far back now,” the police officer told me, “there really wouldn’t be much sense in it.” I made several edits of the film and made more footage—chopping wood with my Opa, the church clock chiming, lights through windows, a man cross country skiing alone at nightfall—but all this remained unfinished. I’ve come to think of it now as preparatory research for my photographic works which I’ve called The Unforgetting. Until recently I thought I would keep all this footage to myself as something that might be interesting later on, more of a private reflection than something to be shown to a public, but somehow its slipped back into my mind of late, and I have started exploring a new way of bringing all this together.