Mara Voss
Mara's subject is weather — the sea in winter, mountains in cloud. She prints everything by hand and distrusts any image that looks finished on the first pass.
Mara Voss grew up on the German Baltic coast, in a town that empties every October and spends the winter listening to the sea. Weather is her only subject — she says everything else is just weather that hasn't been noticed yet. Winter seas, mountains disassembled by cloud, the half-hour a storm needs to organise itself over open water.
She shoots from fixed positions, returning to the same mole, the same headland, the same ridge across years, so that the pictures measure the weather against a constant and not against novelty. The storm sequence in Issue 01 was made across three winters from a single position on a North Sea breakwater, in conditions she describes, without complaint, as hostile to all photography.
Every print is made by her own hand in a darkroom she shares with two other photographers in Hamburg. She distrusts any image that looks finished on the first pass — hers go through a dozen proofs before she will show them, and several dozen before she will sell one.
