German photographer in Greece takes in life with a journalist’s critical eye
A conversation about photography is how a recent interview with Solveigh Kaehler began, but it soon switched to other topics, getting into literature, film and history. Kaehler has had a very interesting and creative life, spanning the globe from Germany to France and from America to Greece, where she settled in 1980. Kathimerini met with Kaehler on the occasion of an exhibition of her work at Arts Center 24, comprising black-and-white photographs taken in Greece, Bretagne, Portugal and Germany, images capturing a life led in the twilight, in a liquid zone somewhere between the real and the fantastic, between profound thought and daydreams. The show runs to June 30. Her portraits with dolls are especially interesting. «I have been told that they are like a reversal of life,» says Kaehler. «The children look like dolls, statues, while the dolls look like children, as if they have life.» Why this obsession? «I don’t really know. It’s something that came upon me quite recently. I didn’t play with dolls when I was a child, so that’s not it. I think it has something to do with the tortuous feeling that something is missing from life, something that is, however, the essence of existence. A person wants to hug someone, but feels he hasn’t any hands, a person wants to speak, but feels that his voice is not enough. The human condition is an uneven battle and art is a gesture that makes you human.» Kaehler’s earliest artistic influences did not come from the image, but from the written word. Indeed, she studied French, English and American literature in Berlin, Paris and Arizona. «I fell in love with early 20th century American literature, like the novels of Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Pasos. I was fascinated by Camus, who said that we must imagine Sisyphus as being happy. And, of course, I really loved Greek poetry and still do.» Kaehler worked as a journalist and enjoyed it immensely before something within her pushed her towards photography. «I wanted to construct my own world through photography,» she says. «The world around me is not enough.» Other than literature, another significant influence on Kaehler’s work has been the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopoulos and Wim Wenders. «They aim at the heart of human existence,» she says. «When in the final scene of Tarkovsky’s ‘Sacrifice’ the young boy waters the withered tree his father had planted, he reminds me of Sisyphus and his rock. It is not the result that counts, but one’s faith in the result. Angelopoulos empties the world so that all that is left is the essence of things. That is what his landscapes are about in my opinion. In Wenders you see an acute anxiety about the individual’s identity in the world.» Kaehler’s father was a stage director and her mother an actress. Did heredity play a part in her discovering her own voice? «I adored my father and ever since I was a young girl I experienced him in the theater. It was a magical world. I only recently realized that through photography I revisit those moments I experienced as a child.» Arts Center 24, Spefsippou 38, Kolonaki, tel 210.721.7897 From Berlin to Athens, in troubled times Kaehler was born in Hamburg in 1949 and worked as a journalist and radio producer in Berlin and Athens (1976-1989). In 1995 she founded the Revoe arts production company, with which she has had collaborations with the Centres des Monuments Nacionaux in Paris and with professor and artist Heiner Georgsdorf from Kassel. She studied photography with Platon Rivelis and has been a member of the Photography Circle since 1992. Kaehler discovered Greece at a time when the country was still under the military dictatorship. «In Berlin I met Maria Farandouri, Mikis Theodorakis and Melina Mercouri, who were making a lot of noise about the dictatorship and who had raised the awareness of many Germans. So, I began reading Greek poetry and first came to the country in 1976. In 1978 I spent seven months in Cyprus researching the 1974 tragedy. I made an acoustic film for Theodorakis and was closely acquainted with [poet] Yiannis Ritsos, and in 1979, a day before he was due in Sweden to receive his Nobel prize, Odysseas Elytis granted me an interview at his home.» Kaehler says that she loves Greece «mainly because of the pain of its history and because of all the bad things done to it by my country. I am part of the generation that inherited collective guilt. This is why my object as a journalist was to write about dictatorships and racism.»
