Walk-In Memories
Article in ZEIT CAMPUS 3/2007, Author Malin Schulz


For her diploma project ‘Frozen Spaces’, Johanna Diehl has gone in search of traces of life in abandoned apartments.

What remains of me, when I am no longer here? The bed, in which I slept? The shirt that I wore? The opened page of my favorite book? When someone leaves home or dies, the room in which he lived becomes a silent witness of his history. Spaces, in which time seems to stand still. A dress still hanging, where it was hung years ago. An imprint on a pillow, a fold in the carpet that no one straightens. It seems as if the dead or the departed continue to exist, if only in the way the porcelain figurines are arranged or how the blanket on the bed is turned up. We approach these places with respect and awe. Opening the cabinet, regarding an object that the deceased last touched. As if someone is still there.
Photographer Johanna Diehl has gone after this feeling with the camera and photographed such long since abandoned spaces. She traveled to fourteen places across Germany, asked for keys to empty houses and apartments, tiptoed across creaking floorboards and opened doors that had been locked since years. “Of course that was pretty creepy sometimes. Once I was in a cellar and turned on the light, when suddenly the radio began to play loud music”, she recalls. “Later I found out that the owner had connected the light switch with the radio.” Some of the former inhabitants had passed away, some simply moved away. Some rooms were still looked after by those remaining behind, who kept their spouse’s room exactly the way it was on the day of their death. Johanna Diehl calls these places “frozen spaces”. They are walk-in memories.

“I began taking photographs of the abandoned rooms in my grandmother’s house”, says the photographer. “It was like a jump backward in time. The room my father lived in as a child, my grandfather’s old office. Everything was exactly like in those days when I was a child. Now nobody is there anymore, and yet I still felt a strange presence. This feeling fascinated me.” With the help of friends and family she began to look for uninhabited houses and apartments. Johanna Diehl doesn’t focus on documenting the fate of the former residents, concentrating instead on the atmosphere of evanescence. And that is why she does not reveal any details about her pictures – the spaces, furniture and objects should tell their own story.

For her photographs, Johanna Diehl changed nothing, not a single piece of furniture was moved for compositional reasons. This allows each room to retain its uniqueness, it special atmosphere. “As soon as you change something, the feeling is lost. You can see it, for example, in museums, where possessions of deceased are also exhibited,” says the photographer. “But you can no longer feel their former owners.” It almost seems as if Johanna Diehl’s photos aren’t images of rooms, but portraits of the people, who lived there. “Although I was no longer as afraid as time went by,” she says. “The feeling of respect and awe never went away.”