by Ruth Stoltenberg
instagram.com/ruth.stoltenberg
These pictures were taken in a relatively short period of time, when public life in Germany came to an almost complete standstill because of Covid-19. Contacts were to take place only in the closest family circle and one could only leave the house to shop for essentials. “Stay at home” was the motto.
“Being locked up” and the uncertainty of how long this condition would continue made me feel increasingly frightening and oppressed, so I tried to capture this feeling in pictures.
In order to visualize this isolation – i.e. the fact of being separated from the outside world and the invisible virus – I had the idea with the glass ball. It reminded of a soap bubble that can burst at any time and shows that we must handle this special situation very carefully.
As photographing was only possible to a limited extent, I worked mainly with my own archive pictures. I played with two and three dimensionality, the very phenomenon of photography. In a way, it illustrates the apparent surrealism of the time; something is wrong. What you see are not 3D models of houses but photographs of houses that have been cut out at their contours and folded at the edges. The glass ball in turn reinforces the “new” three-dimensionality.