The summer house is still there. It simply stands. Like an in-between world that has stopped turning, while everything to the left and right continues steadily on its way. That is the real world. In it, it doesn’t matter what I do, whether I am there or not. It does not depend on me. It turns on its own, regardless. But the summer house stands in an in-between world, one that exists only through me, and that ends at the edge of my imagination. A time made of memory. An eternal time. A time covered in snow.
1988
It is a June day. Not yet the full heat of high summer, but already blindingly bright and warm. A breeze is blowing. That is how it might have been. At least, that is how it lives in my memory. The image stands motionless before my inner eye, its details indistinct. Grandpa Herbert is showing my mother the summer house and the big garden with its wide strawberry bed. The two of them are standing somewhere to my right. My mother has shoulder-length, pitch-black hair. I cannot turn my head to see her. My memory won’t allow it. But I have seen her black hair in an old photograph.
I am lying in the garden on a metal camping bed covered with a stiff, flower-patterned fabric. I look up at the blue sky. The scratchy fabric is fixed to the metal frame with steel springs, and every small movement of my body draws out a soft squeak. So I try to lie still, on my back, thinking of the adventures to come. The eight weeks of summer vacation stretching ahead of me seem like an eternity.
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I began photographing her. It was the beginning of my journey with photography, an attempt to create something that would bind us together. I wanted to be near her.
But it wasn’t my mother who died first. It was my father. I sometimes imagined that he couldn’t bear to watch her go, that this was why he had died before her.
Around the same time, I found myself returning more and more to our old summer house. In my memory, it remained as it had been in my childhood. But the house had been abandoned for years, neglected since we had gone. Surrounded by well-kept properties, it was crumbling a little more with each visit.
After my mother’s death, I found old films and photographs in the attic. Among them was a roll she had taken when I was a toddler. Many of the frames were only partially exposed: the flash had fired, but it had not been synchronised with the shutter. One half of each image was vivid and sharp; the other was dark, cut off by the shutter. These photographs opened a window onto a past I had lived but could not remember.
Book Dummy [The Final Snow]
Fotogalerie Friedrichshain 2022
"Der letzte Schnee ist die intime Schwarz-Weiß-Geschichte eines Sohnes, der den langsamen, krebsbedingten Todeskampf seiner Mutter miterlebt, und die Folgen dieses Todes für die Erinnerungen an diese geliebte Person bewahrt. „Wenn ich jetzt an meine Mutter denke, ist das aus der Perspektive ihres Lebensendes, als hätte meine Erinnerung an sie mit ihrem Tod begonnen“, schreibt der Berliner Fotograf Ilja Niederkirchner. Das Projekt artikuliert Porträts der Mutter des Künstlers während ihrer Krankheit und aktuelle Fotografien des Sommerhauses, in dem Niederkirchner einen Teil seiner Kindheit verbrachte, sowie anderer Orte, die mit seiner Familiengeschichte in Verbindung stehen. In der Ausstellung in einer einzigen Bildzeile präsentiert, bildet die Serie eine Art Zeitstrahl des Lebensendes der Mutter des Künstlers, unterbrochen von Flaschbacks. Während er intensive Bilder der Krankheit zeigt, teilt Niederkirchner mit einem Sinn für Diskretion seine Erfahrung eines anthropologischen Universalismus, so schwindelerregend wie unvermeidlich und natürlich, wie der Tod eines Elternteils."