NUR ICH
ARTWORK
eine Fotografische Serie zum Thema Suizid in Deutschland

"JUST ME" A photographic series by Bianca Patricia on the topic of suicide

 

We are all capable of thinking about our own passing, of imagining ourselves as non-existent. Knowing about one’s own death shapes one’s decisions, life plans and values. In the media, death is omnipresent. This may drive up viewer ratings, but it doesn’t necessarily make us consciously address the idea of our own mortality. The abstract but real fear of death is what keeps individuals dependent, what allows them to be manipulated and uncritical. nur ich (“just me”), a series of photographs created by Munich-based photographer Bianca Patricia in 2009, addresses the issue of suicide. The show attempts to come to a better understanding of this phenomenon in our lives today. The idea came from the way suicide has been represented in the fine arts over the last 1000 years. In music, literature, performing and visual art, suicide has long been elevated and glorified, and is hardly ever presented in a realistic way. People who commit suicide become heroic role models, and death is stylized as an enlightened state of being. The inspiration for Bianca Patricia’s photographic series nur ich came from photographs of suicides in police archives, documenting the mortal remains of the body in the place where it was found. By creating distance, reworking and re-photographing the documentary materials, Bianca Patricia de-individualizes the photos. Faces and surroundings are rendered unrecognizable, and become surfaces for projections. Unadorned and real, the photos depict the most common types of suicide – photographic messages that de-mythologize suicide while raising socially relevant questions.