Container by Anna Simone Wallinger (September 1, 2010) 
(14 votes, average: 3.86 out of 5)
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Introduction by Recommending Viewer
Ingo Mittelstaedt recommended Anna Simone Wallinger to us, saying that “she has an quite interresting approach towards documentary photography.” Despite the uniformity of these fourty pictures, I am intrigued until the very end of the slideshow. Wallinger manages to impose those feelings of emptyness and lack of purposes onto me. She also manages to make me curious about the people she has portrayed in this wonderful body of work. Where are they now?
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Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
to contain: to include, to collect, to control
For refugees and asylum seekers who arrive in Berlin, a settlement of container-like accommodations in an industrial area just outside of Berlin-Spandau functions as a central collection point. In this area, no (social) infrastructure is available either for adults or children. For the duration of their stay, people accommodated here are thus limited in their being to living within the walls of a container home. A temporary, so-called home: expulsion or transfer to another settlement or a private apartment may be the next step. Until their asylum case is processed, they live in limbo, in a vacuum-filled space.
Inspired by this issue as a political problem, the focus of my work is on the people who live in this situation, and who were willing to let me share their accommodation and their story. Twelve hours a day in a container home: every half hour, a photograph was taken from the same vantage point. A central motif is the question of how to view the suffering of others, without falling prey to superficial consumption. On the Basis of Empowerment the project therefore thrives on interaction with the residents, who stage their own lives: they reveal themselves in confrontation with or indifference to their living situation and their allocated living space. For some this becomes their personal refuge and free space; for others, the container-like home is a non-place with a restrictive function.
The moments captured oscillate between helplessness and self-help strategies, between an exceptional situation and everyday routine.
Anna Simone Wallinger (1980) lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
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