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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The idea behind this work of art is inspired by the golden age of the 1920s and wallows in the culture and spirit of a time when people longed for ideal social conditions and the dawn of a new era. For this purpose, original props from the epoch were used. Although the 1920s are associated today largely with desaturated motifs, the colors were deliberately kept bright. The mood, environment and scenes themselves, after all, were not desaturated, but brightly shining and golden. Still, the work bears no direct reference to reality. The use of a background, the bath tub as the central pillar, not corresponding to a reality of any kind in the context of the other props, encourages viewers to tell a story about the photo with their own imagination. Who ‘lived’ in this place, in what condition, with what desires and aspirations, goals or intentions