Birthe used self-portraits and still life
to express individuation and change.
The visual diary started out as a result of
illnesses and ailments that she endured
since 2010. One of them was finding out
that she will never be able to have kids.
“The things that I got diagnosed with
wouldn’t just go away. I realised that there
was very little that I could do to change my
situation. I still continue to grieve for some
of the losses.” She turned to photography
as a mechanism to process her situation.
“It was almost like therapy,” she said.
The project involved her procuring
objects from around the house and posingwith them in different parts of her home.
It was almost as if she surrendered to her
viewers, spilling all her anxieties to them.Idealising the North
While she continued to make self-
portraits, her next project took her several
miles away to Dawson City, in the Yukon
Territory of Canada. Birthe read and
was inspired by American author Jack
London’s stories of his time spent in the
Klondike region of Yukon, in the late
1800s. In his stories, he provided valuable
details of the wilderness there, especially
in his famous book The Call of the Wild.It took her a while
to be accepted into the
close-knit community
of Yukon, and to get
the locals interested in
her project.• When asked
what gear she
uses, Birthe
responds with
“I am a dinosaur
with cameras.”
• For the past 10
years, she has
been using her
Hasselblad 500 C/M
for almost all of
her projects, and
reserves her Canon
EOS-1Ds Mark III for
editorial work.GadGets & Gear100
Better PhotograPhy march 2015Profile