TITLE: Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man

This series captures 80-year-old German photographer Fritz Dressler coping with Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia for the last years. Besides his photographic career Dressler was professor for design, photography and „moving images“ at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. Since then, his life has become lonely in his home village Worpswede, a famous artists’ place in Germany where Fritz was a leading figure for the last 40 years. Health workers drop in everyday. Unable to call his state of mind by it’s name anymore, Dressler musingly comments on it as a matter of fact: „Actually, I don`t know anything anymore.“ But he is yet well aware of his outstanding life and artistic career as a photographer, a knowledge that preserves his identity and presence so far: „I’m not dead, I’m walking!“ In autumn 2016, I started to photograph Fritz Dressler trying to keep in mind how he himself feels about the break down of his creative energy and the rapid disappearance of his intellectual abilities.
The series’ title refers to James Joyce’s Bildungsroman. It ironically comments on the fact that my protagonist, after having already lost his place in society due to him being mentally non-normative, is now on the verge of loosing himself instead of enjoying the wisdom of age. During this project Fritz has found immense pleasure and pride in himself by falling back on taking pictures himself. Something he did forget before, and something that will be forgotten soon again. Fritz’s pictures will be part of a future book project.

AUTHOR: Mirja Maria Thiel (Germany)

Mirja Maria Thiel, born in Hamburg, Germany in 1971, is a journalistic documentary photographer with a background in literature. She graduated with a master thesis about American Poetress Sylvia Plath, and has worked temporarily for German literary publishing houses’ editorial departments and in the image documentation of the World Wide Fund for Nature. In 2014, Mirja discovered her passion for visual storytelling that lead to her studying "Photojournalism and Documentary Photography" at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover. Mirja’s photographic work is long-term and deals in-depth with single characters. Her documentary narratives develope around memory and identity, exploring issues such as Alzheimer’s disease and sexuality in old age . Mirja lives with her her husband and their three children close to Bremen, Germany.
2020 Winner Portrait Of Humanity/ BJP 1854, 2020 Critical Mass Top 50 Photographer.
"Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man" has been shortlisted for the 2020 Wellcome Photography Prize (Wellcome Trust) as well as in several international photo competitions (World Report/Student Award 2018, Siena Photo Award 2019), won Silver at Tokyo Foto Awards 2019, Bronze at Moskow Photo Awards and Bronze and a Honorable Mention at Px3 Prix de la Photographie Paris and was exhibited in Germany, Italy and Australia.