Reflections of D.M. Terblanche

To hold the quiet of a morning as it falls into one’s awareness is no small glory. To

hear the kettle heating its water as the traffic outside runs softly past, through the

insulation of walls and windows.

I arrived by overnight train from Cologne, walking through Berlin Hauptbahnhof in the

early hours of the morning. From there to the Ping Pong residency apartment that

would be my safety and solitary for the next two weeks. Though brief by schedule,

my time there broke through the headache of the everyday, into the openness of

reflection, contemplation. A time for the necessary dilution of artistic folly and fervour.

It was my first institutional residency, and to have it in the living Berlin itself felt

wondrous.

The days were made of jazz clubs and photographic galleries, conversations about

photobooks, pavement dogs and people to be greeted, and time spent with my

project Grim. I’d cheaply printed the photos at the Alexanderplatz DM, to arrange

and rearrange across a table, to carry to a publisher, to bring back rearranged once

more, to keep company.

When not doing that, I was standing outside shops with latex-maid outfits,

photographing fish feeding on the bacteria off a stranger’s feet, and visiting, above

all else, the city’s photo exhibitions. This included Graciela Iturbide’s Eyes to Fly With

at CO/Berlin. With her birds, and her death-compulsion, her contact sheets and her

musings rich as travesty and rich as grace. I found myself thankful the exhibition was

on the ground floor, certain that had it been higher, its soul-weight, its immensity,

would have made it sink to the lower floors, so soulfully heavy it felt.

She wrote:

“I use my bird sight to see the fragments. The camera as mirror as bird eye. And I

with my eyes to fly. Always mid-flight. I look to the skies. Birds like shifting stars and

all of them speaking to one another, telling different stories. Wings spread and

reverberate into silence. Everywhere there are signs of calls to higher powers. I raise

my ear to the sky and hope to hear a response. And I do. It is flocks of wings that fill

my body and guide me.”

I left the exhibition carrying that feeling with me for days.

And I thought of Takashi Yoshimatsu’s Saxophone Concerto Cyber Bird, the second

movement, Bird in Grief. Combine them, and you have a church service for a

photographer confronting physicality, grasping for security. Picking at its own beak,

its own lens, now that it has the chance.

This adventure, as one of many, also fell into the frame of Misha Kominek, with

whom I shared a flower-cupped tea in the sunlicked gallery that is Kominek Gallery,

on an afternoon, and then afterwards a walk where I realised his beanie was

incredibly colourful. I met Misha during my first portfolio review in Braga in 2023,

during the Encontros da Imagem Photography Festival, where I was awarded the

Emergentes Prize 2023. We met again later, and now again. He showed me multiple

photobooks, and we walked around and looked at trees.

It was a reminder of the process of what goes into making a photobook, and of the

camaraderie that comes with the photographic process and those who understand it.

I revisit this conversation writing now. Touch the bark of the trees and the woof of the

dogs being walked nearby. I open the pages of some of my favourite photobooks in

my head, where they rest like friends.

Throughout this, I worked through a wider selection of images from Grim, the project

I have been building for the past year: a story told from the perspective of a spine.

This was accompanied by visits to Fotografiska Berlin, where I saw multiple

exhibitions, including the long-admired work of Nikita Teryoshin, James Nachtwey’s

Memoria, and the exceptionally well-thought-out curation of Diana Markosian’s

Father.

I would return to the apartment at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. alike, gathered by city

experiences, beverages with a photographer friend, and late nights understanding

life itself, wonderful and seedy. I took self-portraits framed by the constant thought

that the body in fright, in flight, is a spirit bird. My birthday came and went, and as a

gift to myself I picked up whipped cream, candles, and butterfly stickers for self-

portraiture, a photograph teeming with comforting wood, and a nice orange.

In that frame, and in this residency, I found a sound space. Rarely have I been given

this much freedom: to be in a basement room, to drift through city walls and halls, to

bloom in its welcoming beauty. In this intermission of my life, the residency was

a brief, necessary intake of breath. And Berlin, may it welcome me back as such

again.