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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Lighthearted ease, nonsensical abundance, and the defiant fickleness of a longing person who doesn’t know why or what he’s longing for. A longing that stings like “the first cut” – that, unprocessed – unchewed – can never be swallowed unavenged, nor hastily flushed down, always finds its way back in times of flaring flashpoints. All just seems lost. The decadence, the luxury (adorned with borrowed plumes), the (extra) loud laughter – behind all this the longing – have faded away in the hungover light of the past party night of a “Holly Golightly” á la “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Relics, directly represented with colors, forms, tastes, and objects drift literally as remnants and demonstrations at the place of compensated longing like a message in a bottle in the open sea, which wants to be found – to be read.