„Volcano or Stone is a series about stones. More or less. It also is a series about the sky and the earth, rivers and lakes. But actually it is about silence, voids and slowness.“ That is how Anne Schwalbe describes her most recent series, but at the same time she contours the loose but overarching concept of her photographic work so far. The photographs of Anne Schwalbe were shot in and around Berlin and Brandenburg, the river Elbe and the Baltic Sea, in Portugal and in London – but the locations are not meant to be of importance to the beholder. Her photography explicitly is not documentary work. Admittedly, one is confronted with documents, but they are documents of the indefinite. Although one might be lead to believe to have seen that electric socket, that piece of meadow or that particular view of the lake before, her photographs evade localization. She manages to invoke existing memories without turning them into specifics.

„My images are not meant to characterize places. I like that the beholder has the opportunity to come up with own ideas. In my photographs reality is reduced to my personal notion of the essential. In the course of time it became apparent that I strive for simplicity, silence and clarity in my work. I think it is very complicated to create something simple that simultaneously, and also because of its simplicity, is very complex.“

Anne Schwalbe (born 1974, in Berlin) studied photography at the Ostkreuz Schule Berlin under Ute and Werner Mahler, as well as Arno Fischer. She lives and works in Berlin.