Towards the end of the last year I was interviewed by the MIAD students Kelly Peloza and Katie Young. They were very patient!

You can read the interview here or below:

KY: What originally sparked your artistic interest in photography?

SG: My interest was sparked very early on: When I was eight years old my mother took me to the darkroom of an Arts Center and I watched her expose pieces of paper to light and carefully place them in the developer tray where the images would appear ever so slowly, so that initially I thought I was imagining it. It was like watching a magic show. I remember the awe I felt and the silence of the darkroom. I still feel that way today.

KY: I am constantly looking at and inspired by various photographers’ work. Which photographers or artists are currently or have always inspired your work?

SG: This may be a bit of a predictable answer but as a color photographer I have always studied and admired the work of William Eggleston. His concept of photographing democratically, of rejecting canonical images and instilling a sense of importance in the most mundane situations resonates with me. When I look at his images I see a part of a story. Sometimes it feels like the message of the image lies just outside the frame – just beyond the viewer’s grasp and that can be equally frustrating and wonderful. I also keep going back to the work of Rinko Kawauchi. When I look at her pictures I feel like I know her – like she’s a friend sharing all these intimate details about her inner and outer life with me. Her new book Illuminance is beautiful.

KP: Was photography an instinct or a choice for you? Did the concepts and personal elements of your work precede your career as a photographer or become fully realized as you worked? Are you still questioning these ideas?

SG: Photography was definitely a choice, though it wasn’t as immediate as I would have liked. I went to university and studied history and political science and then started working as an editorial assistant at a German magazine. But somehow there was this creative void and I realized that photography was a way of filling it.

I am never happier than when I am creating images. I feel like my head can be a noisy place but when I am shooting there’s nothing but silence and an all-pervasive calm. I think that calm permeates my photographs. The act of photographing slows me down. I shoot with my grandfather’s 1953 Rolleiflex, which to me is a nice continuation of family history and tradition. Opa Franz loved his camera. He shot the wedding of my parents with it. And there isn’t a day that I don’t think of him and my family when I am looking at the ground glass. It reminds me equally of where I come from and where I want to go.

KP: Is your self-described sense of rootlessness a driving factor for your travels or have your travels and experience instilled this state of mind about the transience of place? What are your feelings toward your current place of residence and the idea of having a permanent home?

SG: I moved a lot when I was younger. I was born in Germany but moved to the United States when I was six years old. I assimilated, learned the language, adapted to the culture and started identifying with this new nationality. Ten years later I moved back to Germany with my family – again feeling a sense of displacement. I spent the following decade repeating this pattern and skipping from country to country – from Ireland, to Spain, to Austria and finally back to New York, which has evolved into a permanent place of residence in the last five years. Today I’m married to a wonderful man who moved even more than I did and we try to anchor each other. But that doesn’t mean that the restless feeling ever goes away. So I travel.

My photographs have always been about coming to terms with my personal concept of home – it’s a confusing and loaded term for me. I think it was Graciela Iturbide that said “The unconscious obsession we photographers have is that wherever we go we want to find the theme we carry inside ourselves.” This is true for me. It doesn’t matter where I go, the images I make there always form a dialogue between these two cultures I carry inside myself. They are defined by a sense of geographical suspension and a slew of questions about my sense of belonging in this world.

KY: There is a sense of transience or constant moving within the theme of your work. What is the relationship between you and the places you photograph?

SG: In my series The Transience of Things I focused on estate sale houses in the suburbs of Westchester County. This is where I grew up from the age of six to sixteen and the series is a study of the final moments of a home. I was very curious about this place – it always felt full of secrets and lies and regrets. The suburbs are so iconically American and stand for all the values and family traditions of the middle class that are now quietly eroding. When I walk through the houses and photograph I am confronted with so many memories. It’s odd, because they are not necessarily my memories but they nevertheless feel tangible. I can relate to them and I want to communicate this to the people that look at my photographs.

My other series Away works differently. There is no real place anchoring the project. It’s really only about my memories and the way a certain place may make me feel. It’s more of a reflection on myself and a way to communicate in images what I feel but cannot express in words.

KP: While the places and scenes in the photographs on your website are real, the concepts photographed are surreal and ephemeral. Do you explore fantasies to uncover truth or to further create an imagined interpretation of reality?

SG: I consider myself a documentary photographer. None of my images are set up or arranged: Everything that I photograph already exists in its own state and each photograph that I take is a document of a real place or an object in its physical environment. However, all of my photographs are made to communicate on an emotional level as well. I’m a chronic daydreamer and I find this is evident in my images. Places and objects can trigger so many different memories and associations in different people. Each image is equally a document of a reality and a construct of a memory. I think photography lends itself to this beautifully.

KP: Could the same ideas you explore be expressed through writing, painting, or other media? Do you work solely with photographs?

SG: It would be difficult for me to express the ideas and sentiments that I hope to communicate in my photographs through any other medium. If I sat in front of a canvas and had to come up with all of the elements I would want to include on it, I’d sit there for the rest of my life. The same goes for writing. I do love to write and keep a blog where I accompany my images with text that sometimes pertains to the image and sometimes tries to convey a thought that came to mind while looking at or making the image. However, I could never exclusively express myself through writing.

I love photography. I love the process – the analog process, that is. Making the image, then waiting to get the negatives back from the lab, spending hours in the darkroom making contact sheets and later work prints… All of these aspects are a very important part of my creative process. Analog photography continues to teach me about patience and slowing myself down in this world where everything keeps getting faster and faster.

KY: What would your advice be to young photographers wanting to get their work out into the world?

SG: Be persistent. Listen to and take criticism but also stand your ground. Believe in and respect the images you make. Don’t rush things.

KY: Are you currently working on any future projects?

SG: I have been trying to get a project I’m really excited about off the ground for the last eight months (and as I mentioned before… patience is not my strong suit) and hope to begin shooting at the beginning of next year. But I am superstitious and fear that if I talk about it now I might jinx it. So… ask me again in March of 2012!

I took this photograph in Vermont thinking about the animals in the antique store and how it felt weird to drive or walk by them with all their empty eyes staring out at me. Taxidermy is a strange phenomenon. It’s a little like playing God, I guess. One is able to preserve something beautiful, graceful, fleeting and domesticate something that is wild – bring it into a space where it couldn’t exist otherwise. I hope these animals lived good lives, were able to breath the mountain air and feel loose earth under their paws and hooves. Standing in the storefront they looked equally amused, sheepish and pissed off at the pane of glass separating them from their true habitat. And though these expressions were somehow part of the taxidermy process, I could understand all of their reactions.

A few weeks after having made this photograph I went to the MOMA to see Eugene Atget’s Documents Pour Artistes and stumbled upon this photograph:

It’s funny how photographers today are always treading in the footsteps of the masters of photography – regardless of whether or not they are aware of it.

There really was no need to winterize my mother in law’s roses this year. The winter has been abnormally warm. I keep bumping into people – friends, acquaintances – who are delighted by the warm temperatures and tell me what a great “winter” this has been. I can’t quite understand this reaction. To me it’s a worrisome thing.

This is the slideshow I produced for 2011′s LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph. It was the final piece shown on the night of June 10th. (I just went to double-check the date on the LOOK3 website and realized that they have a picture up of the slideshow on the 40 foot-wide screen. It does not quite compute to 450 pixels… but believe me, it was grand!)

The slideshow was recently picked up by Erica McDonald for a Women in Multimedia Night at Spazio Labo’ Center of Photography in Bologna, Italy. To look at other multimedia pieces that were shown there please click here.

Just past the Europabrücke (Europe Bridge), South of Innsbruck in Austria, you can pull over at a reststop. There’s a place to eat, a place to gas up, a place where you can jump off said Europabrücke with a bungee chord. You can also pray. There’s a small chapel atop a hill. The chapel was erected in 1963 and dedicated to all the workers who died while building the 820 meter long bridge. Standing atop the hill, looking through the chapel at the autobahn and the rolling foothills of the Alps I did feel rather peaceful. Later, while researching this place I stumbled upon the phrase “gas station for the soul”. I am not particularly religious, but in a weird way, I found this quite apt.

My parents and I walked into the Ca’ Sagredo Hotel in Venice like we belonged there – like we were guests and had a right to walk up the grand 18th Century staircase, look at the frescoes by Pietro Longhi and lean out the huge windows overlooking the Grand Canal and the Rialto Market. The staff didn’t mind. I think people come there all the time to look at the Palazzo that dates back to the 14th Century, is a national monument and has in recent years been pristinely restored. What was out of the ordinary was that some of the rooms were absolutely deserted. My parents and I (in fact my entire family) are early risers and we arrived at the Palazzo when everyone else had just settled down for breakfast. We had the rest of the rooms to ourselves and I indulged in some early morning daydreams about my parents being Venetian nobility and owning the place.