Blossom Time

The experimental approach to the photographic act of portraying is continued in a group of works Loredana Nemes staged in 2012 as Artist in Residence in Ludwigsburg. For Nemes, the Blossoming Season, which is also the title of the series, is the time between childhood and adulthood, but different from colleagues such as Rineke Dijkstra she does not see the representation of youth as a solitary consideration of exclusively one’s own identity, but she relates the individual to other people – to the first boy- or girlfriend, the small sibling or the clique. In this series of group portraits it is not the “behind” that counts but the “in between”, the space between the individual actors. This space is created by the fact that the adolescents assembling in front of the camera are captured in a quick sequence of single shots which Nemes combines into composite tableaus. In this tracking shot, however, she accentuates the discrepancies, the overlappings, the leaps in time, the shifts of impression. The “Best Friends Forever” are intensive as well as fragile networks; they help when growing up and yet disintegrate. And Loredana Nemes’ sequential constellations allow both – capturing the emotional intensity of relationships but also rendering an idea of individual transition which is inherent in each of her juvenile models, even if this is only expressed in minutely changing details.

Florian Ebner, “Membrane, Fragment, Stage”, 2016