The photo book A Second Beating Heart by Rabea Edel was awarded the German Photo Book Prize 23/24
Using documentary and autofictional techniques , A Second Beating Heart tells the story of a woman who, after giving birth to her child, no longer leaves her home. What begins gradually becomes her new reality. For almost three years, the house is simultaneously a sanctuary, a prison, and a cocoon.
The isolation at home, which many people have experienced as an externally imposed necessity over the past two years, is a vital strategy here. Inner spaces become outer spaces and vice versa.
The path to a new normal is slowly being found – thus, this long-term photographic project is also the story of healing and emancipation from the ideal image of the perfect mother.
Rabea Edel's autofictional photo series about motherhood, with its bright and often unspoken dark sides, is an atypical but very successful form of Ostkreuz documentary filmmaking. (...) The view of the outside world, which seems infinitely far away in moments of depression, becomes doubly palpable.
Birgit Rieger, Tagesspiegel
For over three years, Rabea Edel reenacted the story underlying the book with herself and found images for the light and dark sides of motherhood, an important topic that is too often ignored.
Order A Second Beating Heart by Rabea Edel here
