Katrin Koenning
(b. 1978, Bochum, Germany. Lives and works in Melbourne)

German-born photographer Katrin Koenning migrated to Australia in 2003. This relocation had a profound effect upon her work, which often explores our connections to place, and belonging. The peripatetic artist takes her camera everywhere, creating an elusive, emotional, poetic and prolific body of photography whose subjects span the globe.

All the images in while the mountains had feet, 2020–22, were made during Melbourne’s lockdown period, or in brief moments of regional travel in between. Bringing into dialogue images from four different bodies of work, all made since 2020, the artist creates ‘fragments and slippages to suggest narrative spaces, communities and lived experiences that are allied, fluid and multiplicious’. Koenning’s abiding interest in place-narratives became hyper-localised when she, like many Melburnians, found her life limited to a five-kilometre radius. ‘Walking lent great comfort, day and night’, she explains. ‘Everyone was solacing in being held this way; roads and paths carried all our drifting bodies … No one knew how many years would pass. Were we awake or dreaming?’

Koenning documented her immediate communities and environment – loves, neigh‑ bours, animals, streets, parks, her apartment – revealing stories of entanglement, connection, intimacy, shelter and repair. This strange time became another reminder, she says, that ‘the close is revelatory and never fully known’. Presented as a large-scale installation, this grid of images suggests lapses and uncertainty, echoing the experience of Melbourne’s inhabitants during the pandemic.

Since moving to Australia, Koenning has exhibited extensively in Australian and international solo and group shows. Among her accolades are the 2019 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize; the Australian and New Zealand Photobook of the Year Award in 2016 for her first book Astres Noirs, which was also shortlisted for both the Prix Nadar and the Paris Photo/Aperture First Book Award; and a Josephine Ulrick Win Schubert acquisition (HOTA, 2022). She is a former editor of The Australian Photojournalist, and her images have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Zeit Magazine and Der Spiegel. She has taught photographic thinking across the world, working with institutions and festivals such as Angkor Photo Festival (Siem Reap, Cambodia), The Lighthouse (Calcutta, India), Photo Kathmandu (Kathmandu, Nepal) and Photobook New Zealand, and locally at Perth Centre for Photography, the Australian Centre for Photography and Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography. She holds a Bachelor of Photography from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (2007) and has also taught photography at the University of Queensland, RMIT University and Photography Studies College Melbourne.