October 2005
Snap Happy
Young photographer Orla Connolly is one to watch
Aliens first attracted Orla Connolly to photography—or, at least, what a nine-year-old Connolly then thought were aliens.
Connolly was taking family snapshots of her father and one of her sisters on the cliffs of Donegal in Ireland. The family figures were distorted since, as Connolly would later learn, she was photographing directly into the light. The resulting strange, wispy figures on the photo looked like aliens to the young Irish girl and intrigued her for years.
“Steven Spielberg’s
Alien film was really big at the time and I couldn’t help but wonder if my family were really aliens!” said Connolly. “It was then that I realized that a photo is on the one hand confirmation of something that happens, and on the other hand an image that can tell you something you weren’t aware of.”
As a girl, Dublin-born Connolly became obsessed with her strange photo. As she grew up, she abandoned any notion of her family being aliens, but her interest in photography was by this time very real.
Connolly went on to study photography at the Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design in Dublin. During one summer holiday, she visited Munich, along with many other Irish students, to look for work. While most girls found holiday jobs cleaning in canteens, Connolly walked around Munich, going into any shop that had the word
“Foto” on the outside and asking for a job. Despite Connolly’s lack of German, her persistence paid off and she eventually found work developing photos in the laboratory at “Foto Sauter,” the large photo and video store at Sendlinger Tor. The job gave Connolly her first introduction to German life. “I got to know German society through the images I was seeing,” says Connolly. “There was lots of nudity, even gay sex scenes. I realized that society was a lot freer here than in Ireland.”
Connolly grew captivated by German society during her summer visit. “I like contrasts and the German and Irish come from different planets,” she says. After taking a year off from college, Connolly returned to Munich in 1996 to find out more. She has never left since.
Connolly constantly photographed everything she saw around her in her free time, before making a job of it and becoming an assistant to a German photographer called Jens, who is now her boyfriend. At the same time, Connolly decided to complete her studies at the Akademie für Fotodesign in Munich. There she met lecturer Thomas Luettge, who inspired her to investigate what is behind photography and the role of the image. It was around that time that Connolly started collecting ideas, which she later translated into images. This year, in January, the 32-year-old held her first solo exhibition, in the Seidl-Villa in Schwabing. The project was entitled “Happy” and is the result of three years of photographing people sunbathing and picnicking on the banks of the Isar. In the collection, Connolly turns the human body into an object, in what she terms “portraits of human behavior.” Humans in the images are often small, and juxtaposed next to rocks, pebbles and pieces of wood. They are dwarfed by the landscape and the power of nature around them.
The photos observe people from a distance and draw on the relationships between groups of people, between people and the landscape, and between people and animals. Faces of people Connelly photographs are often turned away from the camera, staring at some unseen point in the distance. “I like to bring in what is not in the image—the idea that the landscape continues outside the photograph,” says Connolly.
The “Happy” series also focuses on the idea of loneliness, with many individuals photographed alone, isolated from groups around them. “It is about the collective loneliness of people who go to these places, like the Isar, to be alone but to be together alone with lots of other people,” she says.
Another of Connolly’s major works is entitled “Umbra Nihili” or “Under the Shadow of Nothingness.” The conceptual-photography series is currently on display at the Museum of Young Art, or MOYA, in Vienna.
“My approach to photography might be more what people associate with literature,” says Connolly. “I like to make visual sentences or a visual story, with connections linking one image to another. Each individual image stands for itself but, when viewed with another one, means something else.” Connolly’s style is unusual and intriguing. For sure, it won’t be the last we see of her.
