crafting the dark truth is a project realised during my MA studies.
My images explore the theme of war and are inspired by the concept of roughly hewn woodcuts. I work within the genre of constructed photography: For this project I purposely kept my images raw and dark. These images urge viewers to reject the normalisation of violence and the indifference that perpetuates suffering. I am deeply disturbed by politics and society’s indifference towards past and current wars. I firmly believe that as photographers and visual creators, we have the ethical responsibility to speak up.
I strived to create an expressionist aesthetic that appears graphically minimalistic: The cut-outs are highly simplified, sometimes childlike, and use obvious symbols that imply weapons and death. I chose a language that is deliberately accessible to everyone. In the spirit of sustainability, my guiding principle was to work only with materials that were available to me, such as packaging cardboard and paper waste, to see how far I could go with them.
The blending of digital photography, overhead projection, and darkroom photograms fueled the project “crafting the dark truth”. Together, these elements culminated in a video, visualising a prototype-exhibition, held in an air-raid shelter. In combination with sound effects, the location and the ensemble of the images exude an eerie ambiance.
