Website: https://www.katyotto.com
I remember taking the first conscious and deliberate, yet naive, photo of my sister in 1988. I dressed her like a model in a black (today we would say) oversized coat and combed her hair neatly. She posed for me in the garage of our house in front of an old wall. I had a pink plastic Beirette SL 100N camera at the time. Color film was too expensive in the GDR, so I photographed in black and white. Over 30 years later, I have internalized my sense of what I see and then capture. All the experiences, experiments, highs and lows now merge into a very natural, artistic work. I completed my professional training as a photographer in Freiburg in 1998. This was followed by assistantships with photographers in Berlin. I have been working as a freelance photographer in Berlin since 2003. For 3 years I have also been working as a set designer for the production of artistic still lifes.
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Marked by tristesse and nostalgia is the beauty found in the barrenness and transience of this work, which is reminiscent of the 1940s, a time of destitution and hardship. An eerie silence and sense of desertion is exuded by the props, bearing witness to strength and energy, overgrown wildly by moss and branches. Original sports equipment evokes a certain agility and joie de vivre, while earthy and lush vegetables, partly draped in ammunition boxes, act as a reminder of food shortages caused by the war of the era juxtaposed with the irresponsible waste of food in our times. Decadence as a means of artistic expression with the ambiguity of double entendre.