Johanna-Maria Fritz has been traveling the world as a photographer for almost ten years. The Berlin-based artist finds her motifs in crises, conflicts, collapsing states, persecuted minorities, and at the margins of society. Because there, where few people look at, she identifies the truth. “There, I see people who are absorbed by their own problems and have never learned to pose according to our standards“, she explains.
Fritz has had portraits of Taliban men woven into rugs. Made by the same girls whom the Islamists had forbidden to learn thus to hope. Supposed iconic imagery that illustrate the inhumanity of the current regime. In spring 2022, Fritz was also one of the first photojournalists in Ukraine, taking pictures in Butcha and the Donbas, among other places. Her work from the front proves that journalistic documentary can meet high aesthetic standards, that beauty can even accentuate the unimaginable. These images have become modern icons.
In the exhibition JENSEITS DER GRENZEN (beyond borders), the recent works are juxtaposed with two older series that were created as long-term art projects. Photographs of ‘witches’ in Romania and circus performers in Muslim-majority countries. Motifs that resemble dreamy landscapes full of contrasts, intimate despite their precarious situations.
