Linn Schröder’s book Ich denke auch Familienbilder (I Think Family Pictures Too) deals, on several levels, with one of photography’s most basic tasks: capturing and preserving memories. Family pictures help us remember and can even create memories, including images that exist only in our heads or arise through stories and imagination. Schröder combines these two ideas poetically, creating pictorial worlds that, through surreal and sometimes staged imagery, speak of astonishment, uncertainty, and perhaps unease.
The book has specific narrative threads. Schröder travelled to Poland with her twin daughters and followed the traces of her mother-in-law, who as a young girl escaped to Germany during the Second World War and passed down her experience through stories. A connection forms across three generations: grandmother, mother, and daughters. Schröder also photographed a befriended family with twins at regular intervals, and the boy next door whom she encountered again and again. She often works in black and white, giving the images a feeling of universal validity. Seemingly identical nature shots repeatedly interrupt the narrative flow and reinforce this timelessness.
At the same time, Schröder’s work points beyond personal experience. Associative images emerge that tell stories in themselves and say something about our humanity. In this artist’s book, these thought-worlds are given an intense, mysteriously dreamlike, and poetic stage. The bilingual German/English edition is published by Hartmann Books in 2021. It has 116 pages with 60 duotone and colour illustrations, designed by Stefan Stefanescu, Hamburg, and bound in printed cloth hardcover. Ich denke auch Familienbilder is her first book.
