Youborn

The idea to this series emerged, when I drove back from a production that, in general, dealt with picturing the vulnerability of women. Me an my assistant René Salomon were discussing the current tendency in society to encourage people to display in public all sorts of emotional turmoil, preferably in real time. Back home, I searched Youtube to find out more about the phenomenon – and stumbled upon hundreds of videos, displaying birth scenes. Some of those mostly amateurish films showed the situation in almost grotesque detail. I thought it would be about time to cover the subject artistically, and conceived a rough idea of the series, which essentially shows the situation shortly after a child is born – always in a not so normal environment, such as a café, a train, a church, etc. The series has a very simple and clear message: its mockumentary large-scale photographs are a critical treatment of the trend to voluntarily destroy the intimate moment of child birth by recording it on videos that are distributed on social networks. It consists of five pictures, each featuring different actors, plus one baby doll: Hannah. 1 - Welcome, Hannah: Lightjet print, 160x100 cm 2 - Highspeed Arrival: Lightjet print, 150x100 cm 3 - Tidy Girl: Lightjet print, 170x100 cm 4 - Paint it Back: Lightjet print, 180x100 cm 5 - Hannalujah: Lightjet print, 170x100 cm