Melina Mörsdorf is from Lübeck and studied Visual Communication at the HFBK. She lives and works in Hamburg and has been leading the Hamburg chapter of the female photoclub for improving the visibility of women in photography since 2020.
Talking to Melina about her work and an edition on FROM, I perceived her to be utterly confident in her style. Style, not in the sense of taste - not at all bourgeois or fixed, but rather conscious and connected with her perception and its photographic realization. In typographic language, Melina Mörsdorf's style is Bold Italic. It emphasizes, it is super present and introduces the new like a foreign word: clear and understandable.
For FROM, we opted for very special and intimate motifs from the archive. The edition Documenting Loss is not a reportage, but is dedicated to a topic that concerns the photographer in her private life. Mörsdorf documents loss and experiences grief by wandering through the garden at night. She captures life in a flash — just before it fades away.
Most of these blossoms come back a year later. But it will be a new generation and these exact flowers will never bloom again. The symbiosis of hysterical joy about the uniqueness of life and the breathtaking feeling of loss is the theme of this edition.
The concept of vanitas, the idea of the transience of all worldly things, characterized the ornament-laden Baroque period. A crazy epoch that was followed a little later by Romanticism. This similarly insane, but at least less clerical period opened the door to self-realization and personal aesthetic expression. Somewhere here, between infinite jest, heavy melancholy and inner freedom, lies Melina Mörsdorf's edition Documenting loss.
Mörsdorf lost her mother to breast cancer at a relatively young age. The edition on FROM is dedicated to her, Heidi. May it find its place in many places and remind us again and again that life is a finite but beautiful place - and that we need to get checked regularly for cancer!
Heidis Hibiscus, Lübeck 1995
“Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei”
Stephan Remmler (Trio)
