My brother continues to be a great source for new story ideas. Just like he recently linked me up with Bruce Bell, one of Toronto's most well known experts and historians, he recently read about a German photographer by the name of Susanne Schleyer who had just published a new book, "Unterwegs" ("On the Road") with 100 photos and stories from 12 different cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, London, Paris, Prague, Rom, San Francisco, Saint Petersburg, Venice and Vienna.
I started doing some research on Susanne's website and realized that she had done other interesting projects and yesterday I spent two hours on the phone, talking with her in Berlin. Susanne is an interesting individual. She is in her early 40s, and studied art and German philology in Berlin and later photography in Leipzig. From 1990 onwards she has undertaken travels for photography projects to Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Russia, Chile, Argentina, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, England, Scotland, Italy and the United States.
For her recent book "Unterwegs" ("On the Road"), Susanne created photos in 12 different cities. Then she selected authors to whom she presented the photos and she requested them to write stories, using the photos as inspiration. The book was just recently published in September of 2005.
The project that fascinated me even more is called "Trilogy - A German History Project", that she did jointly with another artist, Michael J. Stephan. "Trilogy" consists of 3 exhibitions composed of images and sound collages that are each independent but connected. The exhibitions explore German history, sixty years after the end of World War II and the collapse of German National Socialism. With the last witnesses of these times nearly gone, Susanne and Michael set out to search for traces, to come up with a way for asking questions about these times on an artistic and subjective level.