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.'
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'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.'
