Linn Schroder Interview

Interview by Davin Risk

Can you describe the intent of the Sind Sie ein echter Frosch? series? Is it meant to be read as a narrative or more loosely?

LS: The pictures do not form a story in the sense of a clear order or logical arrangement. The intent is rather to create an atmosphere in the same way a story might create one.

MR: As this is an on-going series, what's your process towards these images? Do you see them within the series when you are taking the shots or is it more a function of editing?

LS: I only make the desicion about including pictures in a series when I see the prints. Even then it often is a very long process before I have finally placed them. Nevertheless, during this process I encounter ideas which I remember from the moment of taking the picture.

Initially, I was planning to continue the series “Are you a real frog”, but I have noticed that my pictures have changed. I have widened the distance that I take when I take a picture. People get smaller, more isolated. This may well be a reflection of my own current situation which is rather observant. This position also translates into the pictures without me consciously doing it.

MR: You've said that this work runs parallel to the work of Murakami, can you describe how that relationship began for you? The title of the series comes from Super-Frog Saves Tokyo -- did you begin to connect these images directly after reading that or was it a more organic process?

“Now; you are a real frog, am I right?”

“Yes, of course, as you can see. A real frog is exactly what I am. A product neither of metaphor nor allusion nor deconstruction nor sampling nor any other such complex process, I am a genuine frog. Shall I croak for you?”

Excerpt from Super-Frog Saves Tokyo
After the Quake, 2000 Haruki Murakami

LS: I took the pictures while I was reading Murakami’s books. His stories in a way hold my work together. I saw how Murakami built his own world out of words: a world that connects the surreal with the real, inside and outside, and that is melancholic and poetic. It is a world where waiting and looking for something undefined have great significance. It served me as a frame for my own search for pictures.

MR: Some of the images strike me as having a sense of nostalgia/melancholy for childhood. And there seems to be a similar balance between childhood and adulthood as there is between structure and naturalism. Was that part of your intent?

I am interested in the spaces between things, and rather more interested in the inconcrete than the concrete. However, I do not think that I have a nostalgic or melancholic view on childhood. Maybe on the world, that’s true. What you take for my view on childhood might be my way of viewing the world.

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Linn Schröder is a German photographer represented by Ostkreuz and currently in graduate studies at the University of Art and Design, Zürich.