mélancolie.

This post tries to capture an emotional and aesthetic imprint that has slowly expanded in my subconscious throughout the last year; bubbling beneath the surface as I transitioned from living in Berlin to Munich to coming back to Marburg. It is – for lack of a more novel term – a sort of melancholy. But explicitly not the kind of bogging, nagging sense of having lost something along the way, which in that sense is but a sentimental turn towards the past. Rather, I am trying to describe the feeling of being at ease with what has come to pass; a sort of rounded acceptance of everything up until this point, a very honest and face-to-face encounter with reality.

When going through the pictures I took in 2020, I realised a distinct aesthetic motive that recurred throughout this year. My pictures have become mostly slow, freezing a moment in time that with a wakeful eye and a learned reflex was recognised to be decisive – in some sense of the word. Often, these moments are characterised by a shift of perspective that surprised me, woke me up from my thoughts. Often times, when this occurred, upon raising the eyes, something fell out of time, something clicked, the imagery in front of my eyes sort of retreated one step, revealing some underlying truth. It is this spark of felt universality that I have become intrigued by in photography. Where you do not have to know the person or the objects in the frame to understand at a fundamental level what it means. Where you can connect to the pictures, because you can feel its truth relating to something you have experienced in your own life. This is what „mélancolie“ tries to be a collection of. Slowness. Truth. Universality.