Perchance to dream

With a line from Hamlet's soliloquy "to be or not to be" I escape into a world between fantasy and reality. As if in a daydream, I travel with my partner Bernhard and his transidentity Barbara through natural worlds and theatrical stagings.

With her images of the series Perchance to Dream, photographer Eva Brunner takes us into a world between fantasy and reality, between authenticity and staging. As in a daydream, we go on a journey with constantly changing sceneries in urban spaces and natural worlds, always at the intersection of privat and public. The companion and at the same time the main actor in this exploration of a "theater of real life" is her husband. Permanently present in the flow of the images, he takes on different roles as Bernhard and in his trans identity as Barbara. The special quality of the work Perchance to Dream lies in depicting fleeting moments of everyday life with the same intensity as the theatrical stagings of a "transsexuality". There is no clearly defined separation between the identities. Just as there is much truth in disguise, the unvarnished is full of secrets.

Especially in the medium of photography, with its direct reference to the image of the real, a meticulous distinction is usually made between a documentary attitude, a truthful representation of the living world, on the one hand, and an artistic concept of staging, detached from concrete references to reality, on the other. To free oneself from these limitations in dealing with photography is an important prerequisite for the development of a highly subjective, personal visual language. Only this makes it possible for the photographer to draw a picture of her partner on the fine line between seeing and imagining, between distance and intimacy, which is alive in the sense that it is not purged of everything contradictory and paradoxical. (Text by Wolfgang Zurborn)