"What emerges over time from this immersion in place in Koenning’s practice is
photography as a process of worlding. In The Crossing there is a sense
in which each photograph offers
a miniature portrait of a natural world on the cusp of disappearance. At the same time, there
is ambiguity at play, especially in
Koenning’s arresting images of fish and bird life hovering between states of appearance and
disappearance, or processes of emergence and withdrawal. In Howqua #1 (Falsche Gezeiten, 2015), a tortoise shimmers in
bioluminescent white light and appears as if plummeting into a dark void or
falling through stars. Might this be the last tortoise, hurtling
toward extinction or, more optimistically, can this sole tortoise be read as
a symbol of species survival and thus an emblem of hope? Some
images draw their titles from the work of Michel Serres and, indeed,
The Crossing echoes the French philosopher’s call for “a natural
contract of symbiosis and reciprocity.”
As an embedded and deeply personal response to a transitioning ecology, Koenning’s images
also embody what Zylinska terms a “post-anthropocentric ethics of
expanded obligations.” This is ethics as “a way of taking responsibility, by the human, for various sorts of thickenings of the
universe, across different scales, and
of responding to the tangled mesh of everyday connections
and relations."
