6/5/2010
Eva Bertram
zone B, Berlin
Childhood as a self-willed process is the central theme of 2 One Child by Berlin photographer Eva Bertram. Over a period of eleven years, Bertram photographed her daughter Herveva in the midst of play, discovering her identity, and growing up. A selection of around 70 photos of the girl often shows her amid playing fields she made herself.
Childhood as a self-willed process is the central theme of 2 One Child by Berlin photographer Eva Bertram. Over a period of eleven years, Bertram photographed her daughter Herveva in the midst of play, discovering her identity, and growing up. The pictures not only depict the astonishingly theatrical changes in the girl, but also reflect the special relationship between the photographer and her model, as well as the increasing recognition of the daughter as an independent person.
A selection of around 70 photos of the girl often shows her amid playing fields she made herself. At the same time, the playful quality of her poses and arrangements is also part of the girl's serious role-playing. In this situation the photographer regards herself as an observer of childhood processes, which develop their own independent dynamic through the camera, so that play increasingly becomes performance and presentation.
"In Eva Bertram's photographic art, the Madonna leaves the image. She steps out of it, and directs her gaze on the child. But the child looks back, a long time, before she realizes what this means: to revoke the directive of the other, and to integrate herself into the mesh of reciprocal terms. To see one another - the mother the child, the child the mother, the mother, who sees, how the child sees, how it looks at her, the child who sees, how the mother sees, that she is looked at by it, while it looks back at her - produces the looks of penetrating one another in the photographs.(...)
"It is the solemnness of one's own life, this view, which hits that of the beholders. The solemnness of this work of transformation on that discovered, from which each must draw on their own life that begins with play, in which the child feels his existence as do those who conceal themselves in the clothes of another." Andreas Steffens
Eva Bertram works as interdisziplinary photographer und filmmaker. She is teaching at the New Scool for Photography in Berlin. For her impressive work she received 2006 the grant for Temporary German Photography by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach foundation.
Opening reception Friday 7 May 2010, 7pm
zone B
Brunnenstrasse 149 (U8, Bernauer Str.) Berlin
Opening hours: Sat 11am - 6pm and by appointment
free admission