Petra Jaeniche is an experimental photographic artist working in Odenwald, Germany. She stud-ied both media design and photography, graduating with a degree in design. Her jobs as free-lance photographer, art and film director, with a foray into education science, have opened up a wide field of experience for her. In 2016, she fulfilled her dream of being able to concentrate her work solely on experimental photography. In 2019, she signed on as artist at Galerie Ahlemann, Duisburg, and became a member of the international artist collective, the nonamecollectivegal-lery, London. In 2020, 2021 and 2022 consecutively her works were published in Artdoc Global Photography Magazine, Spectaculum Magazine and NNC Art Magazine London, and shown at the Contemporary Art Ruhr Essen, the ARTe Wiesbaden, the PhotoPopUp Fair Düsseldorf and the KunstVorarlberg, Forum for Contemporary Art, Austria. Petra’s works are currently exhibited in and represented by several modern art galleries.


STATEMENT:
“The question of what exactly makes reality itself real intrigues me. Many philosophers, among them Sartre, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, have explored the question of whether there can be an objective reality at all, if everything is filtered through subjective perception. Constructivism and philosophical theory similarly bases on the assumption that it is our perception that creates the realities around us. The question „How real is our reality?“ underlies all my work. I play with a metaphor for something that is beyond the photographed subject, deal with the representa-tion of something that lies beneath the visible surface of reality, lies beyond the limits of what can be seen and represented. The photographed motif is merely the initial starting point for a creative process. It enables a form of personal reconquest of reality, arising from a longing to allow a radical subjectivity in the appropriation, perception and representation of the world. The digital transformation of my photos shows reality as interpretation and at the same time as irritation. Thus, something new emerges, born of the real yet detached from it and photography becomes a medium for tracing the subjective in the objective. Digitally superimposing different motifs, blurring or playing with a negative and positive presentation simultaneously, these are my essential design tools for my surreal compositions. Nevertheless, the basis of my photo-graphic art is still working with the camera. Artistic creativity with photography as medium turns into a dance with and around the „real“, plays with something that lies beyond the photo-graphed subject, leading the beholder into a reality that can no longer be explained by intellec-tual judgement alone. My works become the image of a journey into my poetic and aesthetic appropriation of the world, and yet they leave the viewer plenty of room for their own percep-tion and experience”