Comments on the series Snapshots, 2020

For me, photography has always also been a space in which to act, where intervention is possible. The goal is to create a new pictorial body the elements of which come together in a compelling way, an intuitive reordering. This involves a process of choosing, fragmenting and, not least, destruction. I often use material from my personal archive for this because elapsed time does not only enable a new way to see the past but also one’s own identity and origins. 

For my Snapshot series I chose photos from family albums. In the process I went on a trip into the history of the female lineage of my mother’s side of the family. They came from Transylvania, Rumania, and grew up in a deeply religious and conservative social system from which subsequent generations tried to liberate themselves.

While my great-grandmother and grandmother still persevered with their traditions in Austria – as did their friends – by wearing aprons and headscarves which for me, as a child, were strange clothes, my mother and aunt intentionally distanced themselves from this by being emphatically fashionable and feminine. We children were influenced accordingly. This was not only an emancipation in fashion, it was also specifically an expression of freedom and self-determination. 

In the resulting collages the images are determined by individual body parts such as arms, legs, feet and parts of the upper torso. This is how new configurations came about in which the physical parts of different people in various proportions were assembled confronted with each other. These are images forming a cultural memory of female bodies and raise questions about the role that gestures, poses and the corresponding clothing has always had in the socialisation of women.

The collages oscillate between fact and fiction; unities of action, space and time are disrupted. This is intended to evoke conscious and unconscious associations in viewers taking them beyond the visual experience.

Brigitte Konyen, 2020