Jessica Backhaus | Six Degrees of Freedom

Jessica Backhaus

In her latest photographic series Six Degrees of Freedom, Jessica Backhaus investigates universal questions of human existence. Taking her own biography as a point of departure, she asks what it means to know the roots of one’s own existence. She is interested in the extent to which one can reconfigure these normally predetermined roots. From a certain point in her life – at first unconsciously, then in an increasingly determined fashion – the photographer, who grew up in a family of artists, embarked on a search for her own origins. In the process, she visited the sites of her childhood and youth and filled in the gaps of her memory. Backhaus’s photographs symbolically record the essence of this search and of the various periods in her life, yet she simultaneously manages the balancing act of leaving the images open for the viewer. Her photographs are metaphors and operate in opposition to classical social documentary photography, oscillating between realism and abstraction.