Der Garten meiner Mutter (My Mother's Garden)

“My Mother’s Garden” is a personal project about memory, loss, and the invisible ties between generations. It traces the story of my mother, Gertrud, who grew up during wartime in poverty, fear, and hunger, but still remembered her childhood as a time of wonder. Her parents’ garden, hidden behind hedges and ditches, became her refuge: a wild, fragile world where beauty and darkness lived side by side. Later, as a mother herself, she built a new garden for us. It was a place of freedom, play, and strange stories, a living echo of her own lost paradise, but tinged with the shadows of our own childhood imaginations. In 2023, weakened by illness and age, she had to leave her beloved garden behind. A year later, she was gone. She left behind her handwritten books, full of memories of the garden that had once protected her. This project, which we once dreamed of finishing together, has now become a farewell. It tells the story of a place that has vanished, a borderland between light and shadow, memory and loss. 88 pages · 165 x 225 mm · Softcover, Swiss Binding (thread-sewn) · GardaPat 13 Kiara 150 gsm / Kamiko Fly Suna 300 gsm · 3 inserts & 1 booklet (16 pages, saddle-stitched) • Nominated for the German Photobook Prize 2026/27 • Part of the collective book "GOMMA BLACK AND WHITE AWARD 2025"