As a native German artist living in the U.S., I get to work in two languages and cultures. My double cultural and linguistic identities inform how I create and what inspires me. Not feeling comfortably at home in either culture makes it easier to look at both from unfamiliar angles.

Influenced by German ideas of what America is like, I still experience both recognition and surprise when I see a small-town motel, a rural church or an abandoned farm—images I seem to remember from American movies or books I watched and read growing up.

In photography and writing, I am interested in the places people make, inhabit, and ultimately leave behind. Geometry and color become composition elements the eye can focus on without being distracted by the presence of people. I mostly photograph using medium-format, twin-lens reflex cameras and color film. The slower process helps me think carefully about what I create.

My ongoing series Rememorials consists of color film photographs showing paper models of vanished homes, schools, businesses, and other buildings, which are photographed in the original locations. All were places of racial injustice and most are located in Arkansas. Accompanying nonfiction narratives tell the stories of each site and the people who lived, studied, or worked there. The paper structures, photos and stories return shape to the fading knowledge of what happened in those places, opening up opportunities for learning, understanding and atonement.