Fotograf
Jessica Backhaus
Jessica Backhaus
Jesus and the Cherries
....“These photos of homes, of landscapes, and people, speak secretly of departure and loss. Backhaus’ project is already today a “remembrance of things past.” The younger generation will no longer hang crucifixes in their living rooms; they will consign the lace doilies to mothballs and buy their canned cherries at the supermarket. These interiors are “original and authentic,” Backhaus says. But photography, as Roland Barthes taught us, is an art of the transient; it is not suitable for capturing the authentic. The fascination of these images thus lies in a kind of anticipation of arriving too late: the viewer knows that he can no longer experience what is shown here. By now, everything has changed. And it was already lost at the moment when Backhaus was pointing her lens at these living rooms and kitchens. Her fascination is not with the nostalgic objects, but instead with this experience of vanishing and slipping away. Occasionally, the photographer finds metaphors for this process, such as when the peeling blue paint on the walls of a house comes into view like the map of an unknown continent, or when she shows us fleeting clouds in the blue of the water’s surface. This attunement to loss and disappearance continually erodes the idyll that Backhaus tries to depict. The hidden tension between present and past, between beauty and transience, is what gives Jesus and the Cherries its special quality. “...
Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen (excerpt from "Jesus and the Cherries")
“Backhaus’ photographs create an index made up of fragments of reality that come together to tell the story about this place. A story about stability, about transcience and about memory.“
Monika Rydiger (excerpt from "Jesus and the Cherries")
Jessica Backhaus
One day in November
Jessica Backhaus’ book is a tribute to Gisèle Freund on what would have been her 100th birthday in December 2008. The book „One day in November“ is a testament to the friendship between the great photographer and a young photography student in Paris during the 1990’s. Intended as a posthumous birthday present, Jessica Backhaus compiled a collection of images that are meant to convey visually what Gisèle Freund taught her and what Gisèle meant to her. Gisèle Freund herself can certainly be considered as one of the great artistic and intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Her impact can be traced to both her photographic and literary work and to her own colorful biography.
"Our experiences in life, our education and the people who are in our lives,
are the essence of who we become. We grow, we change, we evolve and hopefully
keep growing and staying alive in every possible way. " J.B.
Jessica Backhaus
What Still Remains
„What Still Remains“ is the title of her new book made up of 50 works created since 2006 in various locations. After her first book, „Jesus and the Cherries“, about life in rural Poland, the German-American photographer Jessica Backhaus now pursues in this new cycle of photographs the question of why things that have been forgotten or left behind pop up in specific places and then seem to take on a life of their own. Backhaus has succeeded here in capturing motifs that exude an air both sublime and enigmatic. Our gaze is transfixed as we attempt to unravel the mystery of what makes these banal objects so intriguing. In their composed beauty and expressiveness, Backhaus’ photographs are reminiscent of still life paintings. But unlike the classical paintings depicting what were often artificial tableaux of objects meant to evoke aspects of vanitas, Backhaus manages to make time and transience palpable by framing scenes she comes upon by accident.
...“Because as the title of her series, “What Still Remains,” suggests, Backhaus’s photographs are about time passing, about things ending. “Vergänglichkeit” is the German word, not quite translatable into English, that best describes the sense of melancholy transience in her photographs. In “Jesus and the Cherries,” Backhaus photographed in a small town in Poland where the material culture of the place – decorations, appliances, clothing – was changing and old traditions were slipping away. So many of the photographs in this series have a similar feeling of being on the cusp of something: winter turning to spring; the quality of light at dusk, when day is giving way to evening; the end of the meal, the plates still sitting on the table, before everyone’s gotten up to leave. Turning points, in-between states, a beautiful kind of limbo that tugs at the heart and suggests stories of loss and remembrance.”...
Jean Dykstra (excerpt from "What Still Remains")
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Jessica Backhaus er vokset op i en kunstnerisk familie. Hun er født i Cuxhaven i Tyskland i 1970. I en alder af seksten flyttede hun til Paris, hvor hun senere studerede fotografi og visuel kommunikation. I 1992 mødte hun her Gisèle Freund, som blev hendes ven og mentor. Tre år senere lokked hendes passion for fotografiet hende til New York, hvor hun blev assistent for flere fotografer og samtidig forfulgte sine egne ideer og projekter.
Hendes arbejde har været vist på talrige solo- og gruppeudstillinger, herunder the National Portrait Gallery i London og Martin-Gropius Bygningen i Berlin. I efteråret 2005 udkom hendes første bog, ”Jesus and the Cherries” på Kehrer Verlag i Heidelberg. Samme forlag bragte i efteråret 2008 to nye bøger af hende til verden, ”What still remains”, der lige så elegant som tankevækkende fornyer fotografiets forkærlighed for det gamle og nedslidte, og ”One Day in November”, som er en visuel hyldest til den ovennævnte nyklassiske stjernefotograf, tysk/franske Gisèle Freund, der døde i 2000, men ville være blevet 100 år i december 2008.
Jessica Backhaus er repræsenteret af Yancey Richardsons Galleri i New York, galleriet Robert Morat I Hamburg og Photographer’s Gallery I London. I dag er Jessica bosat I New York og deler sin tid og sit liv mellem kontinenterne Europa og USA.
