SABINE KORTH: -from South to North
Sabine Korth moves around the world with a light camera and with a map without borders. The camera is a Minox. The map is constructed through her foreign sensibility. She is German, she lives in Italy, and she has traveled to many "exotic" places: Zimbabwe, Egypt, Ghana, Venezuela, Cuba, Turkey, Mexico, and, of course, Europe.
The feeling of lightness and the exclusion of borders are conducive to Sabine's montages: pictures made of sketchy impressions, contained inside a frame that is not a frame, just a pause between stories, which seem interconnected to one another. When she is back home, she makes the montages. She looks at her contacts like a child looks at her toys. She plays with them, she dreams through them, she cuts and pastes her dreams.
Sabine needs to see distant lands because she needs to explore the nature of her dreams. In some cases, these dreams reflect a Northern European fascination with warm climates and luscious nature. But the work is not about that. She does not appropriate the foreign world with a voyeuristic, distant attraction. Her attraction to these sites has something to do with herself. She questions her own identity as she visits the natives who look like her, smile like her, get undressed like her. She becomes part of her world, feeling, for an instant, that hers is "a small world". But the work is not about that either. Sabine does not recognize a universal pattern which helps her to decipher distant lands and people. She feels different from this world, as she perceives the differences inside it.
She sees English advertisements in Africa, tourist shoes dangling on camels, tv screens above the desert landscape, Christian iconography and African dances, military power and artificial gardens, evolution and revolution. She lets the foreign place visit her, and she brings the memory of the visit into her contemporary European awareness. She brings camels to Berlin, Turkish mosques into Germany, African masks in the subway, the Brandeburg's gate by the Pyramids, the African kids by the Berlin wall. She dwells, with dreams and concerns, in the large world without borders, once captured with a small camera.
Antonella Pelizzari
INSIDE HORIZONS
"In front, the camera takes a photograph, behind it cuts out a silhouette of the photographers soul. In front it sees his object, and behind it sees the reason, why this object should be fixed. Shows things and the desire of it."
(Wim Wenders)
Perceptions
Traveling, I collect instants and atmospheres. I'm not really in showing an action, or telling a fact. These are invented images, chosen from a state of mind; often "recognized" images (found as an answer to something that was already there).
Technique
I work with a Minox. This small camera allows me to get close to people, without interrupting the developing of the situation. A sensitive film and the manageable camera allow me to realize my photos in every light condition. I don't feel any technical limitation. In this way the use of the camera becomes simple and natural, like using a pen. Almost feels like an extension of my finger. I use black and white, because it seems abstract to me, and belongs to the imaginary. It is a way of searching the essence of things without stopping at the surface.
Collage
I have travelled to know, to see and to feel. Capturing situations that touch something inside of me, taking photographs becomes secondary. At the beginning there are travel photos and I never think of putting them together in a collage; very photo is complete on it's own.
Printing a small "diary book", I choose the sequence, rediscovering the way the story runs. Then I realise some images talk to each other. It becomes a game, to choose a first and second plain; when putting the photos together I don't start with any purpose but from an inspiration. Following the sensation of a dream and nostalgia for a faraway land.
In collage I found a way to realise more complete and complex images, bringing them even closer to my experience.
The unreal element
After my studies of classic reportage photography, I soon began to avoid realism, and started to tell my own "stories", instead of documenting reality. I'm not looking for a unilateral simple image, but for the ambiguity of photography: another reality, legible only above the frame.
www.fotokorth.de
You may also reach Sabine via www.vintagephotocollage.eu
You can also reach Sabine via: www.vintagephotocollage.eu/
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