ongoing two

Part of my longtime series „ongoing“ where I follow my only son, my girfriend and the rest of my small family through their life into a intimate space and report what I feel and see. The images are not staged, but apparently affected by me as a close relative and photographer. I go very close and at the same time, I step back and explore the stories beyond our personal space. Making myself familiar – and offering the viewer naked images about his own questions. When I was 4 years old, my baby brother died suddenly. My father tried to reanimate, my mother screamed and I just stood there. Soon later my mother got leukemia. At some point, my father stayed in a mental hospital for a half a year and I lived part of the time in my grandmas place. She was a embittered, but strong person. One day I started to have this dream about her falling off the balcony in her withe nightgown. I started to pack my bag. When I wanted to left, she came back in with the milk boiler and told me: "ah, you know, before you die, you have to get the milk". I dreamed this dream for a very long time, over and over again. My mother died when i was 8. With the decision to have a child myself, I surrendered my emotional safety. I choose vulnerability over distance. The same goes with falling in love with my girlfriend after a few very difficult relationships with men. Then I had to battle with my own illness getting worse. My grandma died the same year. Last Sylvester i survived my mom and got 37 years and 88 days old. During this time, i started to question and study the old learnings about surviving and my distorted and expired view on life, death, love, relations and independence. How to survive symbiosis? How to get contact without drowning in the nourishing seas of milk? How to be vulnerable in a generation told to better be a perfect supergirl? Taking pictures of my partner and son was an invitation to take a second and third look at my believes about me, women and motherhood. Getting the milk, as my grandma stated.