Annika Weertz

Drawing on memories of my parents’ divorce in 2001 and the sudden loss of my father in 2024, I explore in my work the grief I associate with my childhood home, the place where I grew up, which I had to leave after my parents’ divorce, and which I inherited after my father’s death.
Over the course of four years, I have used my photographs to build a new home for myself, one that allows me to enter the emotional world of past and present life circumstances in order to tell stories about memories, loss, and the transformation of my own reality. I want to find images that bring me closer to the answer to the questions of what remains in the end and how much space we give to the painful phases of our lives.

Biography

Annika Weertz, b. 1991 in Nettetal (DE); lives and works in Hanover (DE) and Cologne (Germany). Weertz studied history, specialized journalism (BA), and technical writing (MA) from 2011 to 2018. Since 2023, she has been studying Visual Journalism and Documentary Photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover. She has been working as a freelance photographer and artist in the fields of portraiture and editorial photography since 2019. Her autobiographical works have been exhibited in Germany, the UK, and the U.S. She is co-leader of the Female Photoclub Hannover.