"The Photographs I Love" 13 — Karolin Klüppel

 

Karolin Klüppel. 
“Grace with scary eyes”

 

“All adults have been children once.
But few of them remember it.”
(Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “The Little Prince”)

In this new series of photographs, I would like to give more space to women. Because their vision of the world is always particular.

I don't think there is a “female” photography, but sometimes we can recognize a touch of delicacy typical of female eyes behind an image. And I think this is a compliment. 

 

This may not be a well-known book.

I was lucky enough to buy it at the Frankfurt Book Fair quite a few years ago; I also managed to exchange a few words with the author, Karolin, very kind and cool.

“Kingdom of Girls” is a precious book, both for the splendid edition edited by the publisher Hatje Cantz and for the content.

The German photographer lived for ten months, between 2013 and 2015, in the small village of Mawlynnong, in the state of Meghalaya, in northern India, in one of the wettest and rainy areas in the entire nation.

The meaning of the word Meghalaya is the “abode of the clouds”.

In fact, it really feels like entering a magical, fairy kingdom.

It's no coincidence that the Khasi ethnic population lives in this village, one of the few matrilineal ethnic groups in South Asia, together with the Garo and the Jaintia.

 

Karolin Klüppel

 

Since Karolin Klüppel received her MFA (Master's Degree in Photography) in 2012, she has worked exclusively on personal projects dealing with the latest matriarchal and matrilineal societies of our time. Even spending months living with the subjects of his photographs.

In this case, we are talking about a matrilineal society, where women do not have the same political decision-making power over the men like in the matriarchal tribes, but their power is exercised mainly in the family sphere.

The women are the ones who hold the family name, the landholdings, the ability to choose the husband, and to educate the children, holding the right to the affairs of the various clans.

In a nation like India, which is overwhelmingly patriarchal and macho, where women and girls are often abused and considered far below the value of men (with terrible stories about the fate of girls given birth and left to die in poor rural villages because the destiny of those who are born a woman is already written with letters of pain), this micro-world told by Karolin's photographs gives a smile and a deep sigh.

 

I invite you to visit her website and maybe look for this wonderful book, also for the interesting afterword by Nadine Barth and Andrea Jeska, on the charm of these photographs and on the ethnic characteristics of the Khasi.

 

The images follow one after the other, with an aura of mystery and a lot of ironies.

Unlike Zizola's stabbing photographs, seen in the previous article, here the girls are like little wild queens.

As Karolin Klüppel writes, these girls are well aware that they hold power in the village, they are absolutely free to do whatever they want, they deserve respect and veneration.

She tried to follow them in all their activities, from sleep to games, always trying to be at the level of their eyes, never above: adult yes, but always a woman in the presence of the backbone of their entire ethnic group.

As if in their exuberant desire for freedom and play the scream of pain and anger of all the girls of India rang out.

 

But always with extreme decency and delicacy. The dominant note of this photograph.

 

So how can I go about choosing one? Each of the 36 photos has its own charm and feeling. Even from the cover image: Ibapyntngen with the beetles.

 

Karolin Klüppel. 
“Ibapyntngen with beetles”

 

The one who caught my attention on the shelves of the publishing house at the Fair. In total contact with nature like a Nordic forest deity.

Or the very little Yasmin who is combing her hair, all serious, in front of the mirror as before going to a gala occasion.

The feeling you get from looking at the photos is that, very often, these girls are portrayed in solitude but they have around them like a community aura, an invisible bond with all the other girls in the village.

It's not easy to explain in words, all photos should be seen.

Moreover, as Andrea Jeska recounts well in his afterword “Khasi – Born  of the mother”, in the former times of the Khasi civilization, the health of the clans was given by the number of daughters, and each of the children has a name in the Khasi language that determines their position according to sex and birth order: from Kong, the last-born daughter, to Khadduh, the youngest daughter.

 

Karolin Klüppel. 
“Yasmin combing her hair”

We were saying, which photo did I choose?

Little Grace was featured in four photographs. It almost seems like reading a story.

This is the power of these photographs: they are micro stories, micro tales.

Each of us can indulge in these faces, choose whether to catch fish in the river or experience the perturbing sensuality of Ibapyntngen who puts her lipstick on the mirror in the solitude of her room.

 

I, I said, at first glance loved little Grace in the chair, with the “scary eyes” drawn on her hands.

She stands upright, in a long dress that makes her body almost strangely taller than her age – in another photo of her, she is maybe up in a small chair, hidden by a long dress, looking proud of her stature which makes her a woman.

This is Karolin's skill: she is both able to let us enter the secret of their little lives and their minds, but also to take a step back and leave us the freedom to imagine their thoughts.

 

Maybe because I also, as a child, had an unbridled imagination. Four pebbles were enough for me to create a world with names, relationships and affections; my mother could leave me alone, for hours, and find me in the same place, huddled in myself, with those four pebbles, thinking that I was bored, not knowing that I had created a universe.

Thus, I find myself a lot in the Little Grace. 

It is as if it were my female alter-ego, oblivious to all those “outside my room” who cannot understand. 

The games we create cannot be explained, even to our peers or friends – they would not understand them.

Some things can only be done alone, only in this way give us that deep satisfaction.

And they can't even be called games, that would be an understatement.

It's our fantastic world!

Only me, now and forever, are able to understand why I have drawn my eyes on my hands, and with them I cover my eyes.

Only me know what I'm seeing and who I want to scare with those huge black eyes.

This photograph is a fantastic journey not only into personal childhood, but almost into the ontological dimension of childhood, as Saint-Exupéry was able to do with his Little Prince: he also tired of explaining to grown-ups what they cannot understand.

It has the gift of reminding us of the power of limitless imagination which is a privilege of children and, too often, a fault in adults.

How many of us, faced with what makes us sad or frightens us, or angers us, would like to draw thundering eyes on our hands, like Grace, to chase all this away?

 Little-big Grace does it for us, in a corner of a room in a remote village that hardly anyone knows exists.

 

Not only this is the merit of Karolin Klüppel's work. 

Actually this is a book about women and for women.

A book of revenge and possession: possession of one's femininity as a secret that will be forever inaccessible to every man.

Like the secret of motherhood.

These are images that, I am sure, every woman in every part of the world observes with an intimate smile on her lips. Of understanding.

And all this the German photographer does by playing with little girls.

 

Gorgeous.

“Some will never enter the room. 

They will never see the treasures it houses. 

They will never see the golden light, 

the particular atmosphere, the secret actions. 

There is magic in this room and to comprehend it requires courage. 

Openness. And love.” 

(Nadine Barth)

 

Karolin Klüppel. 
“Grace in long dress”

READ ALSO:

• Moments of Imperfection 
• What Your Eyes See...  
  

Karolin Klüppel Website: https://karolinklueppel.de/
Karolin Klüppel: “Kingdom of Girls” ( Hatje Cantz, 2016)

Italian version