Project Info
“Goodbye Nan>”
8:30 pm, 18th of December 2008. The phone rings. It’s dad calling from up the coast. Nana is dead. No matter how long our struggle with death, and how much time we have to prepare; in the end it comes as a shock.
Phone calls, letters, suitcases. Tears- relieved for her, sad for us.
Two days later, dad and I jump on a plane to Germany, where most of our immediate family live. She did, too. It’s close to Christmas. We don’t feel very festive.
Winter. Cold air and icy rain embrace us when we finally get there. It’s good to see my family, even if her death is what brings us back together. The coming days are filled with food, hot drinks and story telling. Her stories. She had a big life, Nan. Columbia, Germany, children, the Arts…She loved the ocean. She’d stand by it for hours, looking out, seeing, and thinking.
We wait.
We play games to pass time.
We go up into her little flat, sometimes alone, sometimes together. We burn candles, look at her photographs, and listen to her favourite music. The flat feels strange- familiar yet unknown. It’s full, yet void, of her. Books, paintings, her winter coat, her medicine. Her bed. The empty bed gets to me.
Then it’s Christmas, the day after her funeral, and three days before her 90th. We don’t do presents, no singing, none of that. We decide to drive up into the mountains to look out, to see and to think. Up there, quietly in amongst snow and view, close to the sky, we celebrate her life.
(Project Duration: ‘Goodbye Nan’ is a sub-narrative of ‘Near’, an ongoing project of mine, which documents my family. I have been documenting my family for 5 years now.)
Biography
In 1978, Katrin was lucky to be born into an artistic German family. She’d sit for hours and watch her grandma apply oil to canvas. In her grandpa’s art gallery, she’d quietly admire the many artists. They seemed to have a sense of mystery about them. She developed a roaring passion for the visual, which drives her today. Katrin lives in Brisbane, Australia, where she works as a freelance and documentary photographer as well as a teacher of Visual Journalism and Visual Communication at the University of Queensland. She is the current Editor of the Australian PhotoJournalist Magazine, a non-profit publication based on the efforts of emerging photojournalists to promote internationally acclaimed visual storytelling. Much of Katrin’s personal photojournalistic work investigates and challenges the ordinary and every-day and reflects an inexhaustible curiosity in the intricacies of the human condition.