You Felt the Roots Grow: Interview with Sabine Hess
What is your backstory?
I am a Swiss/German photographer, based between London and Switzerland. Notions of home and belonging play an important role in my work. It is often based around my immediate environment and speaks of topics that are close to my heart.
When my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2014, it changed my perception of stability, time and life profoundly. I observed changes within our family. Through the years, pre-existing role models and the relationships between different family members changed. The re-occurring disease made it difficult to maintain a predictable life. However, we established as a family a different way of talking, showing care and affection more openly to each other than we did maybe before. The disease, regardless, remained this hidden threat, growing silently under the surface of the skin. The medical descriptions and various therapies that my dad went through were too abstract for me to understand. Photography and writing, on the other side, gave me a tool to cope with this situation that felt overwhelming at some points.
My dummy book "You Felt the Roots Grow" faces this time between hope and grief. The story is about waiting, silence, hope, strength, growing intimacy and understanding, but also the growth of cancer, the invisibility, the pain and the disappointment. Whilst my sister became a mother, and we were happy to see the new-born life grow, my dad slowly became weaker. The book looks at the body - of the human and the one of nature - its growth and decay, fragility and strength and turns it into a visual language. Ultimately, it is my personal experience as a daughter, in which I face the bitter sweetness of transience, the poetry within loss and the incompleteness of memory. With the passing of my dad last year, the book was created in the urge to remember and to process this intense time of togetherness and finally - separation.
"You Felt the Roots Grow" is the final project for my bachelor's degree at London College of Communication that I complete this summer. The result is this dummy book that I would love to publish in the future.
What camera gear/editing setup did you use for ‘You Felt the Roots Grow’?
I mainly used my analogue Mamiya RZ67 for the book. However, I don't think that the camera is something that determines the quality of an image profoundly. I feel the most comfortable when I am working with film. The slow pace of development and printing reflects on my long-term and more poetic approach to photography.
How did you achieve the look of your photographs in your book, and could you take us through your process?
I do only little editing to the photographs I take. The look, I guess, is pre-determined by the film stock I use. I often go for Ilford HP5 and Ilford HP4 for my black and white photography. Kodak Portra 400 or 800 is my standard colour film. But also, more vaguely describable factors, like the light situation, the atmosphere in the room, and the subject I photograph, determine the feeling I want to communicate.
Could you tell us the backstory of some photographs in your book?
I often put the two images below, together. The first one is my mom, holding my dad. I took it last summer when we knew that his disease was in a terminal stage. The ring and its imprint on my mom's finger is a delicate small detail of the image. It’s a sign of the length of their relationship and how they, over years, have grown together. The second one, the image of the overgrown tree is a symbol of that growth as well. The trees are reaching out to each other, mirroring the embrace of the image before. However, the ivy is taking over the tree as well, cutting off the resources the tree would need to sustain. In this case, there is a link between the ivy and the illness, both interfering in the relationship and life of my dad.
What advice do you have for aspiring photographers who want to make a book?
For me - as a documentary photographer especially - I think it can be important to have a clear story in your head. And then to engage with the photographs you have made and question, if they really depict that narrative you want to tell. If not, there are maybe elements you might want to add to it, or re-photograph things in order to make it clearer. Or maybe, it’s text that is needed for the viewer to understand the meaning of the book. I shied away from using the text at first sight. However, it's now an important part of the book and without it, the story would be less understanable.
I received great constructive feedback from friends. It is very valueable to show your dummy to a selection of people you can trust that they will also speak critical feedback. As I made this project as part of my course, I received many opinions from there, which was very helpful. My boyfriend challenged me a lot in my point of view and helped me to develop the project further. If you work on a very personal project, such as mine, it can be hard sometimes to get honest opinions. But it’s worth it to ask for them - and be prepared to hear them. In the end, however, it's your own decisions that you take.
