The Swedish photographer Katinka Goldberg has worked in Norway since 2008, after earning a BA in photography from Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. She is also a graduate of the Nordic Photo School in Sweden and has had a number of one-woman shows in recent years.
«Throughout my career in photography, I have worked with questions that deal with interpersonal relationships, identity and the longing for a sense of belonging. In my photo book Surfacing (Journal/Gösta Flemming 2011), I tell the story of a close relationship between mother and daughter», Goldberg explains in her application.
The NJP project she will be working on, Shtumer Alef, is a natural continuation, visualising inner events as a consequence of people’s background and family. By learning more about her own family, and her Norwegian material grandmother’s life and fate, Goldberg helps shed light on the relatively unknown story of the Norwegian Jews’ situation during and after the war.
Goldberg’s grandmother managed to flee from the Nazis during World War II. One winter’s day, she fled from her home and family in Trondheim across the border to Sweden. Several Norwegian Jews did the same prior to the mass deportation in 1942. During World War II, it was the Jews who were considered the big problem. Today, the world looks different, but some things do not change. People fleeing and flight in general are a very hot topic, which Goldberg will address through from her own personal perspective and that of her family. She will also travel to the countries and areas of the world that touched her family’s life and fate, thus linking their stories together into a larger historic perspective.
«How does one tell a story of infinite suffering without defining one’s self and earlier generations as victims? For me, this is one of reasons that it is important to not carry the memories of war quietly inside us. I believe the greatest sense of liberation comes from not seeing themselves and their people as victims.»
