Katrin Koenning

Katrin Koenning (born 1978) is a German-born Australian photographer and videographer whose work has been exhibited and published since 2007.

Early life and education Koenning was born and grew up in Bochum, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia where she was educated in a Steiner school. In 2003, aged twenty-five, she moved to Australia where her father and aunt had emigrated in the late 1990s. She studied documentary photography, gaining a Bachelor of Photography with High Distinction at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, during which she achieved Academic Excellence Awards in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and which she completed in 2007.

Photographer Koenning took up photography after the death in a plane crash of a close friend. During 2007 to 2008 she was Picture Editor for Picturing Human Rights and Tell My Story, publications of the Australian PhotoJournalist Magazine and in 2009 to 2010 Editor of their Silent Screams: Rights of the Child. Koenning's photo essays have been published in newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, FT Magazine, British Journal of Photography, The Guardian, Human Rights Defender, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Independent, and SBS Australia.

Koenning works in series and is globally peripatetic yet adopts "an embedded vantage point [in] an ongoing concern for documenting scarred, wounded, and transitioning landscapes.": Lake Mountain (2010–2018) distills into a triptych imagery from return visits over a decade to evidence the effects of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires; The Crossing (2009–2017) is a long-form work in stills and video concerned with human impact on Australian ecology; Pott (2012–2018) details indications of post-industrial transition through places and people of Koenning's birthplace the Ruhr; Loraine and the Illusion of Illoura (2010–2012) documents road trips in Australia; Transit (2007–2014) features portraits of seated travelers lost in thought or sleep; Thirteen: Twenty Lacuna (2009–2011) uses seemingly cinematic, ambient lighting to momentarily spotlight Melbourne city pedestrians; Dear Chris (2012–2013) is a personal encounter with the apprehension and aftermath of suicide; the digital video Collisions (2015–2017) is compiled from brief fragments from mobile photo footage; Indefinitely shot between Australia and her native Germany over eight years, presents the condition of a geographically separated family; As José Alberto Caro Díaz expresses it;German photographer Katrin Koenning and Bangladesh-based photographer Sarker Protick collaborate despite distance. This work represents photographs taken with a mobile phone camera, capturing the ordinary like a drop of water or a ray of light, and transforming it, discovering an unexplored world [and] show a passion for the world that surrounds them. Dan Rule introduces an interview with Koenning with a summary of her series Indefinitely The images that populate Katrin Koenning’s long-running series Indefinitely read as if a syntax of transient moments and fleeting extracts. Shot between Australia, New Zealand and her native Germany over eight years, they waver between the lucid and dreamlike, spanning continents and oceans, cities and forests, crystalline visions and elusive flashes of happenstance. That the Melbourne-based photographer’s family and the vast distances which separate its protagonists underpin Indefinitely says much about these images, which might otherwise seem disparate at a glance. and Photography Studies College (2013–2017, 2020, 2021)

Personal life In 2009 she moved from Brisbane to live and work in Naarm Melbourne.

Publications Books by Koenning Between the Skin and Sea. Chose Commune, 2024. .

Other

Awards 2010: Troika Editions Format Exposure Prize, London 2011: HeadOn Portrait Prize, Critic's Choice Award, selected by Robert McFarlane, for her image, Sleeping Woman. She shared it with Shauna Greyerbiehl, Stephen Dupont and James Brickwood in a prize pool of over $50,000 2014: People's Choice, Bowness Photography Prize 2016: Shortlisted, Prix Nadar for Astres Noirs 2016: Shortlisted, First Book Award, Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, for Astres Noirs 2019: William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize

Exhibitions Solo exhibitions 2012: From a Changed North, Head On Photo Festival, MiCK Gallery, Sydney, Australia 2015: Indefinitely, Athens Photo Festival, Greece 2015: Fieber, PhotoIreland, Ireland 2017: Dear Chris, Chobi Mela International Photography Festival, Dhaka Bangladesh 2017: Indefinitely, Organ Vida Festival, Galerija Kranjčar, Zagreb Croatia (Supported by Goethe-Institut and the Australian Embassy) 2017: Astres Noirs, Paris Photo | East Wing Gallery, Paris France 2018: The Crossing, Hamburg Triennial of Photography, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany 2019: The Crossing, Myanmar Deitta, Yangon Myanmar 2021: the kids are in trouble, Chennai Photo Biennale, India

Group exhibitions 2016 – The Crossing, CCP Declares: On the Social Contract, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne Australia