M. H. Dahmer

M. H. Dahmer Biography

Greece, born 1995

At birth, I got stuck. Lifting my head too soon, opening my shoulders, choking myself in my mother’s vagina. She has always said it was because I was too curious and wanted to see the world right away.

Home was a broken space. My mother was always busy with something else, and it was a relief when my father wasn’t around. I grew up mostly alone, left in the hands of many people - most of them too young or too sick to care for a child - until I was old enough to be on my own.

It was in that loneliness that I found art, and by the age of fifteen I was already discovering self-portraiture as a way to speak when words failed me. When I turned 23 my soon-to-be late husband gifted me a small tripod as I often asked him to take photos of me when we were out, and he knew he wouldn’t be there to do it anymore. After his suicide I turned to photography once again, clinging to it with hands of grief and despair.

In my work you can see traces of my entire life, from childhood to widowhood, from the simplicity of growing up on the countryside of the third world to the chaos of Berlin’s junkyards. With echoes of religion, blur, and melancholic nostalgia, my work exists in the space between vulnerability and strength, serving as a record of my survival and existence. It is a quiet insistence that I am here, that I am real, and that the world can see me.