The Foreignness in the Self and the Self in the Foreign

Photographs in different places from 1990 to 2010

Christa Mayer

The psychologist and photographer Christa Mayer is one of the few women who were able to assert themselves in the legendary Kreuzberger Werkstatt für Photographie in the 1980s. In 2017 she took part in a group Werkstatt exhibition at C/O Berlin. Her present exhibit at Atelier Kirchner is a selection of her newer analog black-and-white photographs, most of them previously unpublished. As with her earlier photographs of Absentees in a psychiatric ward, these also explore the themes of encounter and communication.
Landscapes are juxtaposed with inner and outer spaces. In some pictures we see persons familiar to the photographer gazing at and moving in a landscape, communing with nature and its creatures. Alien things, things difficult to empathize with are converted into photographic images that redefine the term “home.”
Christa Mayer works in the great tradition of classical analogue photography. Bringing the “inner” and the “outer” together, she preserves the singularity of being and thing. Her photographs are at the same time a kind of introspective self-portrait.