I Am Still Here - Beate Sass
“I’m Still Here explores my photographic journey during the COVID-19 pandemic. When stay-at-home orders were issued in March of 2020, I struggled to cope with the acute sense of isolation from the world beyond my doors. Initially, I photographed during my morning walks to distract myself from the distress I felt at the disappearance of the life I’d known. As I settled into the sameness of my days, I began to photograph inside my home. In that stillness, I discovered beauty and magic. I marveled at how the light entering my house elevated the most ordinary objects. I looked deeply, beyond surfaces as I attempted to lose myself in another world. The act of photographing was no longer a mere vehicle to distract me from my feelings of isolation, but it became a conduit to making me feel more grounded in my daily life.”
Reflections on the Theme of Boundaries
Boundaries is a theme that informs much of this work. The delineation between the space in which I had been isolating and the world outside my doors is expressed as a picture leads the viewer beyond the foreground through a portal in the background. It mirrors the time I spent gazing out my windows, longing to be anywhere other than inside my house. The lack of boundaries or edges between the layers in other images reflect the feeling of monotony as my days bled into one another. The essence of my 96-year-old father appears in one of the images and represents the invisible boundary created by the pandemic which prevented us from being together.
Beate Sass is an Atlanta-based writer and self-taught photographer whose fascination with people and storytelling have been shaped by her childhood experiences traveling and living abroad, and as a mother and advocate of a daughter who experiences disability. Sass utilizes the powerful and visual aspect of photography in combination with the written word, to highlight and amplify the voices of those who are often overlooked.
Beate’s work has been featured in solo and joint exhibitions in the Southeast region including The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and the Southeast Museum of Photography, in Daytona, Florida. Her portfolios have been published in Lenswork, Oxford America, and South x Southeast Photomagazine. Beate has found creative solutions for elevating the impact of her work and making it accessible to broad and diverse audiences. In 2016, her project, Real Stories, Real People, was printed in a tabloid format and distributed to Georgia Legislators and local libraries. In 2017, a large-scale installation of her I am Decatur portraits and accompanying stories, were displayed on the downtown bandstand, in the City of Decatur.