Alina Emrich, a Frankfurt based photojournalist, was born in Offenbach, Germany. She began photographing in 2009 after moving to India, where she was working for South India‘s magazine Madurai Messenger and Sunday Times India. In 2011 Alina has been collaborating with NGO‘s in Rwanda documenting today‘s life of Rwandas Genocide Widows during a workshop with Marcus Bleasdale and Gary Knight. Since 2011 she has studied Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the University for Applied Sciences Hanover. Independent projects have brought her to India, Nepal, DRC, Congo Brazzaville and Oman. In 2014 Alina interned as a picture editor for GEO magazine Germany for six months. Since the start of 2015 she has become part of the cartel collective and has been attending a photography course in Aarhus, Denmark. In January 2014 Alina started a long term project where she concerns herself with the triangular relationship between her parents and herself as an adult child. This is the ongoing series that we look at today.
Almost like a beautiful dream
“Weightless, safe and secure, it often feels inside the nest of the parents. “Almost like a beautiful dream.” There comes a time when every bird leaves its nest and wants to break away from the usual bonds. My name is Alina Emrich. I am 25 years old and feel today very far away from this weightless childhood, in which I was born in 1989 as a latecomer in our blended family.
In my work I take again a look in that nest, to go in for a perhaps last, long journey with and to my parents. In this work, it is about love in old age and the triangular relationship between my parents and me, as an adult child. Today my mother Marianne (65 years old) and my father Otto (75 years old) have seven grandchildren.
This project is more about the experience of a moment rather than the simple depiction of circumstances. It is important for me to feel, rather than simply see. This is not just purely photographic work. I let my parents actively participate in my project, as I asked them to keep a diary, interviewed them and let both of them take one Polaroid photo per day. In addition to our conversations, I recorded the daily life of my parents in medium format 6×7, and Polaroids. I hope the viewer can empathize my journey and maybe draw parallels to their own family story.
In the next part of this work, I would like to focus on the everyday life at home in Erlensee, Germany and reclaim the huge image- documenting an archive of my parents.”
To view more of Alina’s work, please visit her website.