High Summer is an atmospheric phenomenon that occurs in Central Europe during the last three or two weeks of the season. It is characterised by an abrupt rise in temperatures and ends in the same way, the heat drops steeply to pass into the cold and gray autumn.
Ten years ago I began to photograph my relationship. We began photographing more intensely during the days of „high summer“, maybe we photographed to keep something that was dear to us safe, in an image. It was the first and the last high summer we spent together. Years later, I came across photos taken at the time, they inspired me to continue photographing the relationships that followed.
The moment you try to hold on to something, it is already gone. To photograph a moment in time, to preserve it in the future, you are inevitably turning it into an immediate past. While observing the past through images, in the future, you start a (photographic) loop. I keep on asking myself: Why do we photograph our relationships? Was/Is this a manifestation of desire? Perhaps photography is just a medium that we use to understand our surroundings, as well as a device with which we unlearn to comprehend the finitude; the more we photograph, the more passionate we are about something or someone, the more we seem to forget that everything comes to an end.
My first high summer in central Europe helped me understand how the heatwave, the rise in temperatures, being outside and living the corporeal experience act just like Desire’s mechanism which implies temporality, transformation (to transform and re-interpret reality) and at the same time goes hand in hand with denying what is natural (the flow of time): the finitude.
This project is the result of photographing the evolution of intimacy in relationships that “coincidentially” ended after the high summer came to an end.
– Ongoing project –
