I took the picture in the summer of 2013, in a rural part of northern Austria. I grew up in Holland. I went back there in 2012 to try to recapture my own childhood, but the farm where I was born no longer existed and the people I knew as a child no longer lived there. And then I found my childhood – or what I wished it had been – here, in the Austrian countryside.
I was asked to do a documentary project about the Waldviertel region, which is how I came to meet these two local little girls, Hannah and Alena. Their mother, Sonja, asked if I would take some pictures of them.
That summer, I travelled to their grandmother’s farm in a village called Waldberg, between Vienna and the Czech Republic. It’s where they always spend their holidays. We became friends and I’ve been going back ever since to photograph them.
The two boys – Martin, who is on the swing with the girls, and his brother Christian, whose hands and feet peek out from behind them – are their friends who spend their summers at the farm, too. When I first met Christian, all he wanted to talk about was my camera. But, from the outset, the girls simply did their own thing. I would start our sessions with a few posted portraits, but soon they would get bored and ignore me. And that’s when I would begin to work.
I think I was lying on the ground to get this shot, with my 35mm. It’s a camera I love because it allows me to be right inside the image, and I want my viewers to feel the same thing.
I don’t know if I purposefully avoided showing their full faces. It wasn’t to anonymise them. Rather, it was to capture something more universal. Instead of looking into their eyes, you follow their individual gazes, and you see the social dynamics at play between them. But I’m not really interested in what they’re playing with. Here, I hate those metal pipes, they spoil my picture. And without the children, there is no picture.
Alena, the older girl, is at the centre of the image, and that’s true in how they play together. It’s a role that naturally falls to her – she is in charge, she decides what they’re going to do, and where they’re going to play. The others are happy to follow her lead. And while any other adult – a parent or a grandparent – might be tempted to intervene (“Don’t do that” or “That’s too rough”), I don’t judge, I don’t comment, or direct anything. I might be present, but the kids are on their own. Wherever they go, I go. They don’t see me. They’re in their own world.
It’s a nostalgic image, with a touch of magic from those disembodied feet and hands of Christian’s. The longer I live, the more I long to be a child again. This project has perhaps been more about looking not for my actual childhood, but one I might have had.
When I was two, my father and older sister Anita were in a car accident. Anita was killed, and my father was left with the mental age of a child of seven. So the only father I knew, growing up, was someone who was aggressive, and of whom I was ashamed. He wasn’t a normal father. Perhaps this is why I look for the idyllic, or the romantic in the stories I shoot – to balance things out, as a coping mechanism. I think that the most important things that happen to you, in life, happen between the ages of two and 12.
When I see these four children here, in their own world, what I love is that they’re in charge. They are powerful. And that’s how I choose not only to depict children in my work, but also how I want to relate to them in everyday life: as human beings, as equals. Respected, empowered, not patronised. They inspire me.
• Carla Kogelman’s I Am Waldviertel is at Schilt Gallery, Amsterdam, until 9 March. The book of the same name is out now from Schilt.
Carla Kogelman’s CV
Born: 1961, Raalte, the Netherlands.
Training: Fotoacademie, Amsterdam.
Influences: August Sander, Inta Ruka, Anders Petersen, Margaret M de Lange, The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke, and Ronja by Astrid Lindgren.
High point: “Winning first prize at the World Press Photo awards in 2014 for portraits – people-observed stories – and in 2018 for long-term projects.”
Top tip: “Try to find your own personal story. The stories we show and tell are the reality we create.”
