Anke Merzbach is a German artist with a fetching name specializing in stark otherworldly photography. Her website, Bildmacherin, contains six galleries filled with beautiful color, tangles of hair, and mysterious expressions. Every image seems enchanted, with its characters just paused for a moment amidst an unfolding fantasy.
Unfortunately my German knowledge is non-existent so there isn’t much more I can offer here. A bit of brief research lead me to Anke’s flickr account as well as a few other bits of web presence but nothing with so much as a bio in English. I almost prefer it - perhaps she’s as mysterious as her images. Enjoy a small selection of my favorites below, and the rest on Anke Merzbach’s official site.
January 8th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Another ruff-lover! This picture is just completely incredible - so much going on!
I love her use of older models.
What an incredible talent.
January 8th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
One more by her, of the paper ruff love [or is it leather?]
January 8th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
LOVE THAT. Never seen a combination of that hairstyle and a ruff before and I think it looks amazing! Great composition, too.
January 8th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Kudos on the COIL!!! keep up the enchanting works!
luv n ruckus the artist among us…
-mark
January 8th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
[...] Check out more here. [...]
January 8th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
One I’ve never seen before! Her work is just wonderful. Thank you.
January 9th, 2008 at 8:51 am
There is no decent bio in German either.
On her page you can find another person interpreting her work as well as another quote, an answer of the question “Why do you write?” by author Christa Wolf serving as a kind of manifesto about art which should be of interest, but I wasn’t able to find an English translation. It is written in a rather sophisticated way, so I don’t really dare try to translate it word by word.
But to summarize, she says that she writes to find out why she has to write.
Writing, to her, is a key to her subconscious, which is the forces within herself that are seen as inadequate, destructive, useless, morbid etc in the given social and historical context and are thus suppressed.
The horror about how these mental forces are divided into useful and useless ones and the grief about the consequences of this splitting influence her work.
She assumes art is the only refuge, the only place allowing to experiment with the vision of the human as a whole, so writing to her is a kind of self-experiment.
If the people of the industrialized world based on division of labor and mislead desideratum will remember their roots, the opulence of human possibilities and thus art she doesn’t know. But she, for her life and herself, needs that connection to this other dimension within herself to give her the feeling of being there (in that “existent” kind of way). This is why she writes.
January 9th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Nina - thank you so much for translating! I got a very bad approximation of that when I entered the writing on her page into the Babelfish translator - your summary is far superior. It sheds a some light onto her work, opens it up a bit.
Questiin: is she talking about her writing because she’s an author as well, or is it that she’s comparing her art to writing?
January 9th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Awww, something clearly got mixed up here but I do not see what exactly you misunderstood. I am a bit busy and don’t have much time to think about what I write, so if some sentences I produce sound confusing in English, just ask further questions.
Sooo… the text I tried to summarize is on that page you can see when you click “Anke M.”, clearly the place to expect a bio. She doesn’t tell anything about herself though and I couldn’t find anything about her on the net either.
What is written there is one article about her work by that Dr. Klaudia Winiarski, some kind of description or interpretation.
If you are really that interested in it you even try to translate it yourself, I can try to tell you what it says too. You will just need to wait until tomorrow or so.
Second article is that one I tried to summarize above. I think you understood Anke wrote it? This is a quote by the German author Christa Wolf who talks about her writing.
As it is in that bio-ish section of the page and sounds like a manifest about art in general I’d clearly assume Anke compares this to her art or sees this as some inspiration.
If Anke herself writes remains unknown, no information about her anywhere :)
January 9th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Oh oh, I get it now!
I think It’s enough to get the point across, and thank you again. I would still be curious to know a little bit about Anke, but not too much - I think the mystery is appropriate and she seems to prefer it this way, anyhow.
January 9th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Oh so gorgeous…the one with the dead mice has a very Pre-Raphaelite feel to it.
August 5th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
The redhead (third image from the top) recalls Klimt’s “Danae” though it definitely has another aspect being a live subject…. and dead mice.
What a prolific and outstanding talent. So lovely and engaging, I’ll be spending the next several hours shirking responsibilities to stare at her page.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
[...] I love this photograph by Anke Merzbach, an amazing photographer I discovered through the illustrious and inimitable COILHOUSE. [...]
December 24th, 2008 at 10:47 am
I love the photo of the girl with the bird and camera. She seems like she fell out of a dream Jeliza-Rose would have had in Tideland.