I haven't invented the things I photographed, that is just how it is. As a photographer, it's my task first of all to record these pictures.
Ever since its invention in the 19th century, photography has documented life. At the same time, it focuses on inviting audiences to a rather subjective world, while trying to be taken seriously as an art form. Photography has always been considered a male-dominated profession, but luckily things are changing. Scholars, writers, bloggers, photography students, and enthusiasts have been giving due to the female pioneers of the field. Most were always standing and/or hiding in the shadows, oblivious to how much they could acclaim and accomplish. Arguably, the techniques, concepts, and thematic female photographers use differ from those of male photographers. At a time when most women were convinced that their place was in the kitchen and certainly not in the dark room, some were struggling to surpass their male counterparts and work towards gaining respect and recognition for their work.
Frauke Eigen (German artist, and photographer, 1969-) was born in Aurich - a town in the East Frisian region of Lower Saxony - and earned a BA in Photography and an ADMP (Advanced Level in Media and Production) at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design. She then got a Master's Degree at the Royal College of Art and a Scholarship at Cité des Arts in Paris.
Eigen began her career in 1995 with the BT New Contemporaries Award for her series of large-scale images of burned walls called Lichtenhagen. Lichtenhagen is a district of Rostock, Germany. Stones and petrol bombs were thrown at an apartment block where asylum seekers lived and neighbourhood onlookers stood by applauding them. In 1996 Eigen worked in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Mexico, and Ukraine and won the Photography of the Year Award by the Association of Photographers in London. In 1999 she won another Scholarship, this time at the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, in France. In 2000 came the Müvésztelep Akadémia Scholarship, in Szeged, Hungary.
In the same year, while Eigen was working as a photojournalist for a government relief organisation in Kosovo, she heard that mass graves were being exhumed, and went to see them. She saw the bodies of the people who had been killed in "ethnic cleansing" (as it was then called) and later on, their clothing and other belongings, which had been removed and washed. Eigen found the belongings more emotionally moving than the bodies and decided to photograph them instead. These photographs became the basis for Fundstücke Kosovo (Kosovo Finds). In 2011-12, Fundstücke Kosovo was featured in the Imperial War Museum London's Women War Artists exhibition and was later published as an edition of ten sets of fourteen photographs. One set was acquired by the Imperial War Museum, and another by the National Gallery of Canada. Eigen's photographs were later used as evidence by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.
Frauke has exhibited her work internationally and won numerous awards for her photojournalistic achievements. Her visual language elevates her subjects; she prefers analogue black and white images printed on extra matt fibre-based paper, which is hand-mounted with rice starch. Her art might be calm and subtle, yet it arrests the viewers. And although she searches for harmony and symmetry in her work, she is not afraid to embrace imperfections and abstraction. Eigen currently lives and works in Berlin.
Most of my pictures are quite dead-straight photography. That means I see a subject and make a picture of it.
We will continue talking about female names that left their mark on photography and about contemporary female photographers who are still to emerge. There are a lot of female photographers out there deserving of praise and we can only hope to cover as many of them as we can. Please follow this space to find out more.