Maria Sturm

With the end of my pregnancy, I began taking pictures of myself. Since October 2020, I’ve been photographing us both. I frame us carefully, squeezing into the image. The act of photographing is both deliberate and meditative. It allows me to pause and reflect on my intertwined roles as a mother, a migrant, and a woman.
In these images, I reflect on my child's experience of growing up, a reality that will likely differ from my own. This brings both relief that my child may be spared some of my burdens and a sense of melancholy in the face of the inevitable distance that will grow between us. “Mother Tongue” refers to our native language as an anchor of identity. For me, it also stands for the unspoken language of motherhood: gestures, glances, and rhythms of care that go beyond words. In this work, photography becomes a way to adapt to the changes in motherhood and identity.

Biografie

Maria Sturm, b. 1985 in Ploiești (RO); lives and works in Berlin (DE). Sturm describes herself as a photographer, mother and teacher, who was trained in Germany and the USA. She works both on long-term personal projects and as a photojournalist for international media. Her practice focuses on questions of identity shaped by migration, motherhood, and belonging, drawing on contexts ranging from Turkey to the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina. She is a Fulbright and DAAD scholar and a recipient of the Daylight Photo Award and the PH Museum Women Photographer Grant.