On potato roses and burning tree tops, Annemie Martin and Jana Kießer

A photographic dialogue during the Corona pandemic with notes, thoughts, memories and dreams – March 2020 to May 2021.

The series “Von Kartoffelrosen und brennenden Baumkronen” (On potato roses and burning treetops) by Annemie Martin and Jana Kießer reflects the changed everyday life during the Corona pandemic in the form of a photographic dialogue with personal texts. Mostly 800 kilometers apart – Annemie spent much of the Corona period on an island in Lake Constance, Jana in Berlin – the two photographers conducted the dialogue for more than a year.

press comments:

monopol headlines 12.05.2020:

“At Corona-Lockdown, two Berlin photographers have entered into a photographic conversation. The images tell of a wondrous time of retreat that is now already over again” and writes further:
“While relaxers are already announcing an end to pandemic-related restrictions, Berlin photographers Annemie Martin and Jana Kießer are capturing their personal impressions of the crisis period on camera. The result is a dialogical series of images that shows the personal and conveys the general. How is the health of the grandparents? Now who cuts whose hair? Is the garbage collection coming for pickup?
Intimate and banal issues of Corona’s everyday life are also experienced differently by the photographer friends because they have dealt with them unequally since the beginning of the pandemic. Currently, there are just over 800 kilometres between them. Jana Kießer stayed in Berlin and Annemie Martin travelled with her boyfriend and child to her grandmother’s care on an island in Lake Constance.
Complementing their unagitated imagery, both photographers jot down thoughts, memories, or dreams and place them in context with individual photographs.”

Christoph Amend and Felicitas Breschendorf write in the ZEITmagazin Newsletteron 12.05.21:

“Jana Kießer stayed in Berlin, and because the two friends could no longer meet, they sent each other photographs and thoughts. From this arose a joint diary that the two keep to this day, and the most beautiful thing about it is the everyday. “I think more often: I can do that tomorrow, too,” Jana Kießer once writes, and Annemie Martin later adds: “At some point there comes a point when you should mow the lawn.”