Contact:
Silvia Otte Photography
+49 (0) 179-766 7664
About the artist
Silvia Otte was born in Bremen, Germany.
She studied photography at the Bavarian State Academy for Photography in Munich from 1987-1989.
After earning her degree in 1989 she moved to New York City, where she lived and worked for 15 years on her fine art, as well as a freelance portrait and travel photography for numerous magazines, record companies and various other commercial clients like the Washington Post
Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Details, Esquire, Sony Records, Arista Records and Warner Bros. among
others.
She moved back to her native Germany in 2005, where she continues her pursuits in experimental fine art photography.
Driven by an interest in psychology, she went back to university and received her MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2018.
She lives with her husband, her stepson and chocolate Labrador Bela in Dresden and Berlin.
About the work
Don't worry, everything is transatory (dweit), 2021
artist statement coming soon....
Nemophilist
A Nemophilist refers to a person with a love for forests seeking out its solitude.
Inspired by the works on nature by Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau, the series “Nemophilist” is a continuation or extension of the previous series “Arbores”, which was about the discovery of newness in the familiar and deep appreciation for the delicate preciousness and frailty of trees.This time though, the emphasis has been put on a innate desire to become one with and/or dissolve in nature, in times of daily interactions with emerging technologies, using various silhouettes as proxies for myself.
Arbores
The images for the ongoing project “Arbores” depict trees in different stages of maturity and season. According to the World Wildlife Fund, each year 18.7 million acres of forests are lost, which equates to 27 soccer fields every minute. The causes for global deforestation are multifactorial, from climate change, clear-cutting for agriculture, logging, mining and overpopulation. Although the Amazon, forests in Borneo and the Greater Mekong area are with their vast sizes and large scale deforestation plans of special concern when it comes to sustaining a plethora of species on this planet, so are smaller forests closer to home, soaking up carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.
This inspired me to create images of trees, layered and mirrored in postproduction, as an extension of my fondest wish to discover newness in something as familiar and close to home as the trees we see every day in our parks and cities. Due to the restricted mobility associated with Multiple Sclerosis, I am not able to travel as I uesed to, nevertheless hope to do my share in increasing awareness about the preciousness and frailty of forests by showing their delicate elegance and mesmerizing beauty.
Quality of Rest
In the absence of light, human use and interaction, I have been exploring urban landscapes at night for over 25 years.
As with our eye, which adjusts to lightlessness over time, I attempt through long time exposures to alter the darkness and it’s secrets which lay within.
Through the use of my camera I am able to see where the power of my own eyes in low light deserts me. Combining hunter and gatherer I walk and or drive through the late hours looking for asleep scenes and objects that patiently wait for the morning to offer their reuse.
Noise
Moments become memories. They get stored in our long-term memory. With advancing age, increased neuronal noise, i.e. spontaneous neuronal activity, mitigates the ability to access these pasts, obscuring and opposing all objectivity, changing the way we view our past.
This leaves our perceptions fractured and fragmented into a cacophony of faded images we no longer grasp. By stripping away the first layers of obvious photographic recognition, these photos of the series "noise" disclose my struggle with reliving some of these veiled seconds which in turn expose my inability to find verifiable truth.
All experimental alterations were done analogue and with NO use of Photoshop. Negatives were scanned to for digital printing.
Organica
For my husband Jens
Perception and interpretation of one's reality differs immensely from one human to another. In the 1920s Hermann Rorschach developed the famous and yet controversial Rorschach or ink blot test which was designed as a personality test. The assumption was and is that inferences about a person's subconscious can be made by analyzing a person's response to ambiguous stimuli, e.g. irregular and symmetric mirrored ink blots.
I employed this technique of mirroring images of organic matter, making use of the pleasing properties that the resulting symmetry has to offer.
The viewer is invited to dream up and discover non-existing and equivocal organica.
Moment
We live life. We do what we do. Everyday.
While we do one task we contemplate the next, living in past and future. Judged and justified in our minds, we rely on others perceptions of our own self.
By watching our self in the mundane moments of life, a dislocation can take place in a split second, watching ourself do and be without verdict, but a simple kind awareness of our own presence .Oberserving our self ever changing and flowing within an impermanence, that we are an inevitably part of. This is the gift of the present.
None of the people depicted in these photographs are twins . The double exposures were done in camera, not in Photoshop.
Lying in your absence
For my father Hans Otte (1926-2007 )
In the process of assembling new worlds from my previous photographs, I discovered how my life had turned upside down after the death of father.
Unable to bear new fruit , I hid in the low light recycling and reprocessing that that had happened to me in an contemplative effort to look for comfort in photographic lies and eventually find a path back to my new reality.
