Isabelle Graeff – Exit

Isabelle Graeff (*1977 in Heidelberg) became known in 2010 for her series My Mother And I. For this project she spent years accompanying her mother with a camera, in order to question the relationship between mother and child. The photographs for her project Exit now expand the search for identity to an entirely new country.

Between August 2015 and June 2016 the London-based photographer observed with a compassionate eye the crisis of a country whose population has been painfully divided since the Brexit referendum at the very latest. A country divided between people whose gaze is directed outward and people who are looking inward. A country that has again begun a new search for an identity that already exists in all of its mystical beauty, because its nature remains untouched by social developments.

Graeff traces these upheavals, changes, and developments with her camera. The critic Niklas Maak has written an insightful essay about this, which contextualizes the images on various levels.