Katrin Koenning made the photographs in *between the skin and sea* between 2020 and 2023, a period the publisher frames as one of collective upheaval. The book turns away from the panoramic and toward what is close at hand: the artist’s immediate communities, and the ties of love, grief, kinship, shelter and repair that hold them together. The title announces its register—skin as boundary and contact, sea as what exceeds or dissolves it—and the pictures are described as leaning into shadow rather than forcing legibility.
The Australian photographer, born in Dortmund in 1978, has built a practice around intimacy and interconnection, treating photography as a relational encounter rather than a record of separated subjects. Here that approach takes the form of fragments and slippages, image-dialogues whose gaps are left open. Rather than illustrating a thesis, the sequencing lets narrative spaces stay fluid and plural, so that the book reads as a set of overlapping proximities instead of a single arc.
Editing and sequencing were carried out by Koenning with Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, who also designed the volume in collaboration with Perrine Serre. The result is a considered object: 188 pages and 125 plates at 21 by 26 centimetres, section-sewn and OTA-bound in a debossed softcover with a tip-on, with text in French and English. For a collector, the interest lies in that collaboration and in the book’s timing—an extended, locally rooted body of work made during years of disruption—rather than in any claim about the object’s scarcity.
published by Chose Commune in November 2024, *between the skin and sea* extends Koenning’s investigation of intimacy into book form, where editing and sequence carry as much weight as any single frame.
