Andrea Diefenbach lives as a freelance photographer in Wiesbaden. She studied photography at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and has since worked for German and international magazines and organizations as well as on personal long-term projects.

She has already received many awards for her critical and emphatic reflections on social conditions and grievances.

Her first book “AIDS in Odessa” about the AIDS epidemic in Ukraine was published by Hatje Cantz in 2008. Solo and group exhibitions followed, among others in Hamburg, Mannheim and New York. Her second book “Land ohne Eltern” was published by Kehrer Verlag in November 2012 and in a second edition in June 2016. Here she dealt with labour migration from the Republic of Moldova and accompanied divided families for several years. The children in Moldova and their parents, most of whom live illegally in Italy, the country in the EU to which most Moldovans emigrate. The associated exhibition has been touring for seven years and has been shown as a solo exhibition as well as in group exhibitions, for example at the Stadtmuseum in Munich, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon. A selection of her works is in the collection of the Folkwang Museum, the Stadtmuseum Munich and the Open Society Foundation in New York.

Winterreise by Luc Delahaye

The little paperback book, which bears the same name as Schubert’s song cycle, has accompanied me more than any other photo book. I took it with me to Odessa in 2006 when I photographed my project AIDS in Odessa. There it inspired me for three months and was at the same time a comfort because it showed me pictures of what I myself experienced on a daily basis. Winterreise is a melancholy road trip. Luc Delahaye travelled through Russia in the winter of 1998/99. Invited into the homes and lives of ordinary people, he has created an intimate, moving and revealing portrait of a harsh land where he finds beauty and sadness in equal measure.

Knit Club by Carolyn Drake

I’ve been an admirer of Carolyn Drake’s work for what must be 15 years, from her National Geographic coverage of the Lubavitch Jewish community in Brooklyn to her recent garden installations during the Corona Lockdown.

Her fourth book, Knit Club, is out in the fall of 2020 and is my new favorite. Carolyn collaborated with a circle of women in Water Valley, Mississippi for several years for this project and developed the photographs together. They appear to have been created in a creative game, creating a mysterious tension between the real and the supernatural – where the broadest themes are explorations of femininity and motherhood.

Die Tage – Das Leben von Andreas Mader

In 2013 I saw some pictures of the series for the first time in a group exhibition and met Andreas Mader by chance a short time later. Before the work was then published as a book in 2019, I had viewed it digitally many, many times.

Andreas Mader has been portraying his friends for 30 years, at first casually during his studies, then at some point very consciously and with the large format camera.

The result is a series of portraits that are both very affectionate and unsentimental, which take you on a journey through the lives of these friends and, at the same time, tell the story of their lives like a large puzzle, a condensed, grand narrative: “About love, hope, the growing up of children, the change of the outer appearance, about loss and transience”, he says himself.