FRAGMENTS OF NOW

The corona pandemic has brought into focus issues that are often not perceived in everyday life ─ transience, silence, emptiness, fragility and beauty of life, loneliness, being thrown back on oneself. These are precisely the themes of my new project "fragments of now". Like an anticipation of what is now omnipresent, it has matured between 2017 and 2019, driven by my own experiences of loss and vulnerability. I discover the fragments for this project wherever I move, whether outside in the city or in my flat, where a reflection of condensed water at a window turns out to be immeasurable beauty – even if today this motif let us think of the virus. In this work I feel no limitations ‒ day or night, detail or space, objects or structures, abandoned or showing people. This is different from my other projects as an urban photographer, which mostly refer to specific places and how they are conquered by people. But what do I want to say with this work? I see it as a study of life, of the beauty in everything and the fragility of everything. I try to convey an overall sense of it by capturing fleeting and silent moments, showing the missing and combining it with structures of nature. When these fragments, either on their own or together, make something vibrate in the viewer, I am happy. But already the work on this project, the discovery of these little pieces to sketch a picture of the world as I feel it, fulfills me. It is a personal, associative work in which I seek my own way of dealing with transience. ― anna thiele