Alexandra Vogt’s photographs tell stories in the field of tension between staging and documentation. In the works presented at FOTOHOF, she turns her gaze to the deceptive idyll of a family life in the German provinces, as exemplified by the portrait of the Lolitaesque daughter, on whose shoulders an uneasy pressure seems to rest.
The horse at the girl’s side, a leitmotif in Vogt’s work for autobiographical reasons, is the captured dream of escaping the inhospitable reality. The possibility of escape and the conquest of a world of one’s own. Like the motif of the cowboy in distress who jumps out of the window of the saloon onto his waiting horse in order to escape into the vastness of the prairie.

“Individually, as well as in series, the works hint at the monstrosities that might be hiding behind a cosy façade, but without ever revealing anything concrete. This subtle touching of a story, woven from sexual tension and omnipresent unease, plays with the viewer’s expectations and fears. Time and again, the images push the viewer to the abysmal depths of his or her own thinking. Thus they touch on much more than just the perils of growing up and the love of horses. They are at the same time a concave mirror and a friction surface for our imagination in the dichotomy between dream and nightmare”.