TITLE: I'm me

People with disability

For about 30 years, I've been working on art, especially on art photography. In the course of time, I have devoted a lot to the photography of faces. Each face was unique to me and unmistakable. Through the eye of the camera I could not only see the faces, but also feel the life in them, which has strongly imprinted on the faces.

When I first encountered people with physical and mental disabilities, I was very surprised and amazed at the vitality, satisfaction and security that these people have had in them. In the past, I was allowed to visit the residential care home for people with disabilities in Hagen several times. The contacts there have completely changed my point of view on the topic of disability. Through my personal contacts and in many conversations I was able to get to know the people living there more closely.

What made me curious and what keeps me fascinated is the question, where these people with even the most severe disabilities draw their power, vitality, joy, satisfaction and security from and what we can learn from them.

AUTHOR: Christoph Woloszyn (Germany)

Christoph Woloszyn was born in Poland. He has been living in Hagen with his family since 1987. In 2010 he took up his study of “Photo design” at the “Institut für Bildende Kunst und Kunsttherapie” (Institute of Fine Arts and Art Therapy ) in Bochum. He holds exhibitions in galleries and houses that are open to art photography. In his creative work he individually takes up questions, techniques and the Avandgardismus of the 20s of the last century to react as an artist to developments and discoveries of one Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has up to this day become a complicated but exciting journey into the dream, the transcendental and the super temporal. Nature and body are used as symbolic forces in his photographic paths. In these metamorphosis’s he varies the eternal topic: the human longing for harmony, for being one (with the natural environment), for “true” beauty.
Christoph Woloszyn is one of those who work their cameras professionally and innovatively. The man from Hagen uses light, technical effects and materials for the alienation of a motif to bring it closer to us, but in a different constellation and from a different point of view. The familiar becomes strange, the unknown exciting and new. For years this artist whose development has progressed amazingly fast and consequently has worked at his programme, his subjects and his stylistic direction. In his experimental imagery he works as a surrealist.

Jörg Loskill, Art historian, author and editor, Translation into English by Marion Grollich
40 years cultural editor of the WAZ