Finalist 2017: Ekaterina Sevrouk

Ekaterina Sevrouk draws on German Romanticism for the landscape images that make up her ‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen’ (As a stranger I arrived) series. While composed of mountains, lakes and wooded areas that are reminiscent of their romantic inspiration, they differ in a decisive factor: all the protagonists in the scenes are young, African men.

For the ‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen’ series started in 2015, the photographer used traditional landscape motifs taken in the surroundings of Salzburg and the Salzkammergut. Sevrouk developed the concrete ideas for the images in collaboration with African asylum seekers, whom she first met in a so-called first reception centre in Salzkammergut. The title for the now completed series was taken from Franz Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ (Winter Journey) song cycle. The poems by Wilhelm Müller, that form the basis of Schubert’s songs about a melancholic traveller, alternate between exuberant joy and hopeless despair, societal isolation and individual longing. 

In the quiet compositions, where the young Africans appear self-confidently in landscapes foreign to them, the photographer has created tellingly symbolic pictures, that pick up on both the sense of self of the protagonists, while also admonishing the world’s current, political situation. Consequently, Sevrouk’s series represents a very timely, if somewhat ethereal, sequel to ‘Winterreise’.

Each of those portrayed has his own life story, his own unique experience of fleeing, migration and the desire for asylum in Europe. The aesthetic style Sevrouk has chosen reveals the respect and dignity with which the she relates to these people, while the landscapes convey the appropriate framework, reflecting a transitory state between staged and real, that very consciously removes those portrayed from their difficult everyday situation. The more the viewer tries to interpret the images, the more additional questions arise.