TrAIN

Resident Artist - TrAIN - KSB Artist's Residency

Katharina Dubno - 2012 TrAIN-KSB Artist in Residence

KATHARINA DUBNO
FOTOGRAFIE & DESIGN VITA

Katharina Dubno was born in Poland/UpperSilesia. When she was seven years old, she moved with her partens
from Poland to Mainz, Germany, where she went to school and got her university-entrance diploma.In 2005 she passed the artistic entry examination for studies in Communication Design at the University of applied sciences in Mainz. For her intermediate examination she consequently decided to use photography as the method of choice.
She choose a documentary project, in which she travelled around her home country of Poland and Upper Silesia.
The result was a photo album with the title “Between the Times”, which documented her journey. The images included short but highly memorable captions.

After her experiences during the intermediate diploma studies, Katharina decided to make photography her main focus for the rest of her studies, searching for “Images from life”, in an attempt to understand the events
by observation. She took part in various photography seminars and participated intensively in the following years in almost all
offered photography and international projects. She was present for the Istanbul project, she joined the project
“On both sides of the wall – every day life in Israel and Palestine” and she worked on the project “Across Europe
– from Essen over Pecs to Istanbul: the cultural capitals 2010”.

Katharina always approaches the people in her photographs, dealing with them directly and putting them and
their environment. into the center of her artistic work. It’s the little stories beneath big events that fascinate her and which tell much about the lifestyle, the mentality, the social developments and the culture of countries. She considers those stories as important contemporary documents that are necessary to understand ourselves.

Katharina completely immerses into every new project, photographically and personally, trying to adapt the
perspective of the people she is photographing to develop empathy and abandon prejudices which is necessary
to capture their lives as authentically as possible. She chooses this approach to create an atmosphere of trust.
Katharina also followed this very approach while working on her diploma theses project entitled “ Visiting the
Unknown – Couchsurfing through Europe” and noticed repeatedly that one benefits from apprehending the
unknown as a chance to broaden one’s horizon.

She travelled through eastern Europe – from Gdansk at the Baltic See across Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania,
Bulgaria and Turkey up to Istanbul at the Bosporus. During this journey she stayed exclusively with private
people as a “Couchsurfer”, using the internet-website under the same name.
This meant that she had to get involved with people and their lives and to approach the subjects with compassion. This resulted in a photographic report: a series of views on the reality and stories of people. At first view it looks like an artistic journey diary, which reveals itself later as an exciting contemporary document,
reflecting profoundly the situation in eastern Europe.

Katharina completed her Diploma in design with an emphasis on Photography at the the University of Applied
Sciences in Mainz, Germany and urrently works as an independent photographer.

By Professor Stefan Enders

Links

• Katharina Dubno's Website