Verena Brandt

Photographer
I'm okay. How are you?
Public Story
I'm okay. How are you?
Copyright Verena Brandt 2024
Updated Dec 2012
Topics Documentary, Photography

I'm okay. How are you? – 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.

 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 these 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.

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