Out of the Frame: Conversations 

about Photography Podcast with Pia Johnson

 between the skin and sea review 

by Milena Ill, Fisheye Magazine

'...Fauna, flora, and human beings all share a dull pain here. Faces are absent from view, absorbed—with a few exceptions, such as the final image, that of a child perched on adult shoulders, half-turned toward us, seeming to defy the viewer—as if ironically reminding us that everything escapes us. The photographs, initially in black and white, taken in various locations across Australia, traverse fragments of ordinary existence—a cat, a house, many children—without ever descending into the chronicle. Each scene seems imbued with a silent disturbance, a diffuse sadness; the use of black and white establishes a suspended, almost spectral time. So much so that nature itself seems to become a mourning character: a cat gazing sadly out the window, damaged forests, ants – mentioned in the text – carrying their dead… Everything in Between the Skin and Sea suggests a loss shared between humans and non-humans.

“I think that in our time of ecological emergency, it’s impossible not to feel this way, unless you think of yourself as separate from or superior to the natural world,” she says (...) Never far from the scenes we contemplate, there is the sea, a profound yearning whose symbolic power permeates the work even in its title. Between the sea and the skin: between what overflows and what contains, between what carries and what keeps, between what escapes us and what we can touch. In this tension, there is photography, a fragile refuge, an attempt to be “like water,” that is, elusive, porous, alive.'

...

 

 'Between the Skin and Sea thus establishes itself as a poetics of entanglement, both fragile and profound. The author's fragmentary style is steeped in a powerful timelessness, a sober delicacy. The formats are multiple—film, digital, color, black and white. At the center of the book, a colorful interlude, announced by flowers, briefly emerges—red hair, a clay vase—before disappearing in favor of the half-light of a full moon populated by creatures and shadows. But nothing is fixed here: the photographer rejects any closure or resolution. "What I seek is to make several truths coexist in the same story, a multiplicity of life experiences," she confides. Conceived in collaboration with Chose Commune and its founder Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi, Katrin Koenning's book is a porous and moving work, which captures interdependence, intimate and universal, and invites us to listen to the shared silences of the world.'

 between the skin and sea review, 

American Suburb X 

 CONVERSATION WITH BEN SMITH, A SMALL VOICE PODCAST

 

 between the skin and sea review by 

Diane Smyth, British Journal of Photography 

 

 between the skin and sea 

review by Jörg Colberg ~ CPH Mag

...

...'between the skin and sea is filled with a dread that cannot truly be named because it’s more than what  was produced by the pandemic. It’s difficult to remember this now, but there also was a real beauty to the many manifestations of solidarity that emerged at the time (at least until we all got so tired of living under that particular Damocles sword).

The book contains frequent allusions to those as well, to the reaching out and being with each other, realizing that the physical distance we would have to observe only served to remind us of the closeness we felt with each other.

This is the kind of book that could only have been made by a mature artist, someone who has been in this world for a while to know about her own and other people’s vulnerabilities, someone who has had her fair share of suffering and disappointments, someone who knows how to pull a widely felt sentiment out of her innermost emotional core.'

 

'Instead, art has to remind us of what little shards of shared humanity we have left. Photographs ask us to see — and then to feel (or rather the good ones do; the others are still only pictures of sticks and stones that no highfalutin statement can salvage).

And this is the age where we have to force ourselves to look, to see, to feel — and then to act. For things to get better, we will have to start out at the smallest scales — a little kindness to a stranger maybe, or a smile.'

   spread, between the skin and sea, Chose Commune

 Installation view, if only we could take the time: contemporary Australian photography, 

National Portrait Gallery Canberra, until June 1, 2025