CarlaKogelman

Ich bin Waldviertel

In 2012 during an Austrian theatre festival, Carla Kogelman was commissioned by Szene Bunte Wahne to do a photographic project on the region of Waldviertel near the border with the Czech Republic.

In Merkenbrechts, a small rural village with only 170 inhabitants, Kogelman met Hannah and Alena, two sisters from a farming family, aged 7 and 9, and she began to photograph the girls as they went about their daily lives. An enduring friendship developed between Carla and the girls which lasts to this day. “The camera allows me to become a part of the community and its vicissitudes”, explains Kogelman. “I feel quite close to the subjects I choose to photograph and I use my camera as a safe demarcation line between myself and them”. The games Hannah and Alena play, their simplicity, and the manner in which the sisters are growing up reminds Kogelman of her own childhood which she also spent in a large family like theirs. What fascinates her most of all is the children’s ability to interact with each other under a variety of situations and they way they communicate with each other physically as their relations develop and evolve.

The Ich bin Walderviertel (I am Waldviertel) project continued into 2014, and that same year Kogelman’s project won the Observed Portraits category of the World Press Photo contest. Prior to that, in 2013 Carla Kogelman won the Zilveren Camera prize, with a series of portraits depicting actors backstage, and also the SO (Selection of Dutch Photography).