This is an extract from my Photobook HAUS + HÄNDE (house + hands) which is my Master thesis. I portrayed the house of my grandparents, in which our family lives since 1890. Back than my greatgreatgreatgrandfather bought the house to build his photostudio. I combined photography from our family photo archive and my own pictures of the house and surroundings,

as well as portraits from my grandmother, my mother and myself. The house was always given to a doughter of the family.

While making the series, I was pregnant with my daughter, who is born in November. That is why I decided to focus on the women of my family and in this extract espacially on my grandmother INGRID, who lives there with her husband. She will probably be the last owner of this family house, because my mother and me do not want to back to that village.

In my series I try to show the almost never changing atmosphere of the house and the village. Generations lived there and

World War I and World War II changed their lives. Than the village in the middle of Germany became a village at the border and  

a central trainstation to the West. To visit my family in their village people needed a special permission because of the border. Nowadays my grandparents are connec-ted to people from the neighbour village, just 2 kilometers far away, which was part

of the American Sector before and unreachable for decades.