KATRIN KOENNING

THIRTEEN:TWENTY LACUNA

I have a never ending love affair with the hustle of the city and what happens when strangers are thrown together in close proximity.

Once, while venturing through the city in search of faces and light, I came across this place in the CBD. Light reaches it directly for only 20 minutes a day, around lunchtime, when people rush away from work to get sandwiches and coffee. During these few minutes, a transformation occurs – faces are illuminated, dust twirls through rays of sun, cigarette smoke becomes an almost glistening silver-blue against dark buildings. You can hear snippets of conversation and laughter between friends and sometimes the muffled tum-tum of an iPod. It’s a ‘mise en scene’, a theatre stage on which people become my protagonists for an instant. Here, every minute detail counts. Blue coats, red ribbons and green bags become significant ‘props’. Everything ordinary turns into something extra-ordinary.

Thirteen:Twenty Lacuna is an ongoing body of work capturing tiny moments of us – strangers – passing each other by unnoticed. We stare ahead, buried in thought. There is a fragile beauty in our distant gazes as if inside we are hanging on to something out of reach to anyone else.

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BIOGRAPHY

Katrin is a documentary photographer based in Melbourne. Much of her work investigates and challenges the ordinary and everyday. Her images have been exhibited in Australia, the US, Singapore, Malaysia, the UK and Germany and have been showcased at festivals such as Voies Off Photo Festival in Arles (France), the City of Gijon International Photojournalism Festival (Spain), FotoFreo, Fremantle and the Ballarat International Foto Biennale (Australia). In late 2010, Near, her long-term documentation of her family, will be part of the Reportage Festival in Sydney. Thirteen:Twenty Lacuna, will be featured at Format Festival Derby, UK in 2011. Katrin has won numerous awards including the Troika Editions Format Exposure Prize, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, the APA Award for Best Documentary Photography and the Godfrey Rivers Medal for outstanding photographic achievement, amongst others. In 2006-2008, she was the picture editor of the Australian PhotoJournalist (APJ) Magazine. Katrin is also the editor of the APJ’s Silent Screams: Rights of the Child, due out in late 2010. She is a photographer for Amnesty International Australia and is represented by Obscura Photos. Website

Much of her personal documentary work investigates and challenges the ordinary and reflects a deep curiosity in the everyday intricacies of the human condition. (for widget)