What made me love photography was its boundary problems: how the ambiguous power of decisions such as composition, editing, framing, circulation and presentation of an image tends to determine the meaning more than that which is being depicted. Or, for example, the opaqueness of boundaries between the depicted and depicter that are easily blurred by the dynamics of power. These tendencies allow photography a vast, mysterious area for an artist to investigate and play in. What has surprised me most lately, in my inquiry into this phenomenon, is how closely the experience of motherhood has paralleled it and in turn, has fed my images post-partum.

My last exhibition at Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris, was titled mother, feelings, cognac, which was an attempt to communicate a sense of lost boundaries, between bodies, images, definitions: a certain amnesia, personal and general, if you will. Recently, I sense myself moving away from that as well, but whatever is brewing is very new and I can't yet verbalize it.

When we could still afford to have a stable world view, an image could shift our perception of the world. In this sense, it’s the billion collective images that I’ve consumed in the past ten years that have resonated with me the most. Slowly, over time, the power of a single exhibition or image to change one’s perception has been put to question. In a time of relentless and almost involuntary consumption of images, the rise of mass-market digital retouching and live rendering software, can a single image hold power?

Artists have been foreshadowing our ‘post truth’ moment for a long time. I think whether directly or indirectly, all work is affected by the broader realities of its time. Generally, I don’t set out to comment on things through my work. Following the last US presidential election, however, I was invited to participate in a group show called Produktion: Made in Germany Drei, at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. For this exhibition I worked on a concise project, titled MID, where I photographed – off the computer screen – found images of window locks produced in Germany. I also added a crumpled ribbon of a different colour to each image, in order to keep things open to interpretation. But the images still turned out to be too resolved for me. After that experience, I turned in again, hoping that the personal, with its call to empathy, can also be political.

What comes after the pictorial turn? Instagram has eaten Facebook, fashion is having pop culture for breakfast, emojis are feasting on the written word, and most of human communication is taking place on a screen. Maybe the pictorial turn is the last turn we make before the end.

This text is from our current issue, Objektiv #20. In the tenth year of the magazine, we’ve invited twenty artists to contribute. Some have been given carte blanche to create unique portfolios or collage-like mind maps about the kind of photography that inspires their practices—and perhaps, through this, share something about their future paths. Short statements accompany each artist’s contribution.