ongoing

These images are part of my longtime series „ongoing“. I follow my only son, my father, my girfriend and the rest of my shattered small family through their life into a intimate space and report what I feel and see. The images are unstaged, but apparently affected by me as a close relative and photographer.

This piece of the project was made during the short warm spring and summer period around my home in Bern in Switzerland. We don’t meet so often and we are not many in my family. Not really a clan, more single persons with strange but strong ties. No united christmas dinners. But meeting each other at the sauna or the river, sweaty, unadorned, different.

I do look for them as individual persons, for their relations and positions in life. One man emerging, one leaving soon and me as a mother and daughter wandering in the middle, not really ready to let go both of them. I search for our personal family identity. Single fighters bound together. Bewildering resilience, alarming closeness and interspace.

Beyond that, i draw a picture of myself and my nagging matters, using them as my mirror. I never was good in knowing who I am and whenever I tried to define and be myself by fencing me off from the rest of the world, I failed and lost connection completely. So I am not collecting memories. I don't try to preserve whats happening by producing images like canning surplus ripe fruits in autumn. Instead, I find the reflections of myself in someone else. 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.

The themes are big and old and so scary, I feel I need maximal reduction to have a chance to create understandable results without getting lost in meaningless details or mawkish old stories. So I stay close and follow the few people who are really near me and go for the places in my neighborhood. I choose the limited two-dimensional black and white photography as my tool and I work with no additional light or technical frippery. It sometimes feels a bit like making contact with smoke signals instead of Skype.

"Rahel Krabichler is a swiss photographer working on commissions as well as personal projects, exploring, challenging and disturbing the ordinary and cliche knowledge of identity and interconnections.

Rahel is based in the suburbs of Berne, Switzerland where she lives with her son in a small apartment on the border to countryside."