Category: intimacy

Between the shadows, Katrin Koenning delicately reveals the connections and networks of love, sorrow, intimacy, and healing.

Spanning three years (2020-2023),  between the skin and sea emerges at a time of great collective upheaval. The hyper-local takes centre-stage; made among the artist’s immediate communities, tales of entanglement, relation, connection and intimacy unfold. Leaning into the shadows, the photographs trace networks of love, grief, kinship, shelter and repair.

Katrin Koenning (b.1978) is an artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. between the skin and sea is her first monograph.

In 1978, just months after meeting each other, Seiichi Furuya and Christine Gössler traveled to Bologna, documenting their first trip on Super 8. Seven years later, they returned to Italy, this time to Venice, which would be their last journey together.

In 1973, Seiichi Furuya left Japan for Europe on board of the Trans-Siberian train. He arrived in Austria where he first settled in Vienna, before moving to Graz where he met Christine Gössler in 1978. From this day forward, he started photographing her, in the intimacy of their home in Graz but also during their travels abroad — to Germany, England, Italy…and Japan, their most distant destination. Christine studied art history and worked for the radio, making documentary programs. After the birth of their son in 1981, she became increasingly involved in the world of theatre. As she was devoting herself to her acting lessons, she started to show signs of schizophrenia. Christine committed suicide in East Berlin in 1985.

Since Christine’s disappearance, Furuya has never stopped revisiting his archive. This initiative was presented in a series of five books entitled Mémoires, published between 1989 and 2010, and in Face to Face, published by Chose Commune in 2020. In 2018, Seiichi Furuya found super 8 film rolls in his attic. One of them was a recording of the very first trip he made with Christine, in Bologna in 1978 a few weeks after they had met. As an attempt to remember a trip he had completely forgotten about, Seiichi Furuya started extracting stills from the film, frame by frame. These images compose his new series First Trip to Bologna 1978. Together with this series, in the same book, we are releasing a newly edited version of Last Trip to Venice 1985, which was first self-published in 2002. This series presents photographs from Seiichi and Christine’s very last trip, before Christine took her own life.

In Deanna Dikeman’s family album, ordinary moments embody universal truths and become a source of daily wonder.

After publishing Leaving and Waving in 2021, which presented only a glimpse of Deanna’s Dikeman’s 3-decade journey to document her family, Chose Commune is proud to introduce the photographer’s larger series in an exhaustive 300-page book: Relative Moments.

In Relative Moments, Deanna Dikeman chronicles ordinary moments of her family’s activities. From gardening to cutting cake, from filling up the bird bath to mending a piece of clothing, from mowing the lawn to picking rhubarb, one gets to discover an everyday that might otherwise go unnoticed. In this book, which was generously edited and sequenced — 200 photographs in total — one is not only meant to see the moment shot in one photograph, but all the moments that compose the story. 

This project captures a visual history of the photographer family’s life, yet, there is an ongoing narrative embedded in these photographs that conveys larger, more universal truths about American culture, familiarity, and the endless source of everyday wonder that surrounds us.

Biography

Deanna Dikeman (born in 1954 in Sioux City, Iowa, USA) currently resides in Kansas City.
She has photographed her midwestern family and surroundings since 1985, when she left a corporate job to try a photography class. She has M.S. and B.S. degrees from Purdue University.
She received an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship in 1996, and the United States Artists Booth Fellowship in 2008. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.

This print is part of a series of 5 prints by women photographers that we have previously published: Moe Suzuki, Mikiko Hara, Clémentine Schneidermann, Irina Rozovsky and Deanna Dikeman.

Masako Tomiya is a photographer originally from the region of Aomori, north Japan. She has lived in Tokyo for years, and one day, she received news that her sister and sister-in-law, who live near her hometown, were both pregnant. This news inspired Tomiya’s series Kito, a reflection on identity, family, transmission and the passing of time.

“Kito” means “homeward” in Japanese. Inverted, “toki” takes on a completely different meaning: “time”. In her poetic series, Tomiya plays with this dual sense. Her reflective photographic journey is undertaken with a subtle meditation on nature, and its seasonal transformation, alongside a representation of human life through women. Tomiya stages self-portraits and captures the daily lives of her mother, sisters and new-borns, to explore how her sense of home has altered with time.

I’ve lived my life asking myself
“What am I? What is this world?”
For a long time, I wandered without answers, and before I knew it I was older.
Had time flown by, or was it all a dream resembling a memory?
This story transcends time and meaning and self
by staring down the idea of “myself.”