Rebekka Deubner [photographer]

Rebekka Deubner realized photograms for Chloé AW22's worldwide campaign, next to Zoë Ghertner.

These images were shot during Rebekka Deubner’s second journey to Fukushima-ken, in the summer of 2019. On 03.11.2011 a part of the north-east-coast was impacted by three major catastrophes: a naval quake, a tsunami, and lastly the explosion of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Deconstruction does not only causes annihilation, it also creates the occasion for new forms of life to emerge. ‘tempête après tempête’ portrays Fukushima through close-ups of inhabitants, scattered pieces of land, details of sea landscapes, moving elements of nature such as insects, humans, seaweed, pieces of bodies,… they all merge into a new and hybrid body.

Taking close-ups is a way of working that is essential to Rebekka’s practice. Looking at things from a near perspective, gives her the opportunity to feel their materiality and texture directly through her eyes. It is as if the lens of the camera is an extension of her touch. It also allows her and her subjects to experience a form of contemplation. Taking time to create a testimony of this land where all the scattered pieces were never been understood as a whole.

A selection of pictures were published in Tide Magazine. The whole serie has been published as a book at Art Paper Editions.

Styling by Laëtitia Leporcq

In Japanese celebration, dance and death have long been connected. Rebekka Deubner's photographs, taken during the festival of Obon, capture glimpses of this Buddhist celebration honoring the spirits of the ancestors and their presence among the living. These images of fireworks, body parts, masks, and textiles unveil 'Odori', the dance of Bon. At the heart of these five-hundred year old traditional celebrations, the costumes, music, and gestures are collected into an exhilarating trance that lends shape to the spirits of the deceased. With 'Odori', Rebekka Deubner composes picture loops that operate akin to amulets that wish to seek other inner worlds; highlighting the mystical, to escape reason and underline life's boundedness.

Squid milk is a collection of fragments of Rebekka's Japanese exodus edited in resonance and recurrence of forms, characters, and motifs, drawn from the daily life that Rebekka invents for herself, as well as from musical, cinematographic, and photographic references. The edition constructs the sequencing of a silent film for which Livio Mosca composed the soundtrack. 

The soundtrack can be accessed here: https://enfancemusic.bandcamp.com/album/loreille-nacr-e

Squid milk is a collection of fragments of Rebekka's Japanese exodus edited in resonance and recurrence of forms, characters, and motifs, drawn from the daily life that Rebekka invents for herself, as well as from musical, cinematographic, and photographic references. The edition constructs the sequencing of a silent film for which Livio Mosca composed the soundtrack. 

The soundtrack can be accessed here: https://enfancemusic.bandcamp.com/album/loreille-nacr-e

Rebekka studies the photogram technic through a pantie. The creation, mainly photographic, is in Rebekka's eyes a response to the disappearance, a way to remain active in front of things she has no control over, to give form to the void and make it her own. She thus explores the question of her mother's absent body and tries to make it re-emerge through her clothes, textile molts, second skins, and uninhabited forms which she inherited and whose forms she fixes here in the darkroom.

Rebekka Deubner photographed the Dead Sea in Jordan for Chloé.