Katrin Koenning [ 1 ] is a German-born Australian photographer and videographer whose work has been exhibited and published since Koenning was born and grew up in Bochum , a city in North Rhine-Westphalia where she was educated in Steiner school.
In , aged twenty-five, she moved to Australia where her father and aunt had emigrated in the late s. Koenning took up photography after the death in a plane crash of a close friend. Koenning works in series and is globally peripatetic yet adopts "an embedded vantage point [in] an ongoing concern for documenting scarred, wounded, and transitioning landscapes.
By returning to the same environments where she situates herself in the landscape, waiting and watching for moments to unfold, Koenning suggests that "it's through immersion that I can be part of a land. In The Crossing there is a sense in which each photograph offers a miniature portrait of a natural world on the cusp of disappearance. At the same time, there is ambiguity at play, especially in Koenning's arresting images of fish and bird life hovering between states of appearance and disappearance, or processes of emergence and withdrawal.
The book Astres Noirs , Koenning's first, was the result of distributing her work using social media. In their studio in Paris, far removed from Bangladesh and Australia, they developed a book concept that replicated the illumination of the mobile phone screen and its constant flow of imagery;. On black paper the pages [are] printed in silver ink with traces of a harsh and blinding light originally generated by the smartphone.
Thus, the light of the images is not white, but a metallic gray, paradoxically evoking the essential material of film photography: silver salt.
