Häutungen / Shedding — Sandra Buschow

Shedding is an autobiographical body of work begun in January 2024 and brought to its culmination in January 2026. Through self-portraiture and abstraction, the series approaches the body as a site of layered histories, vulnerability, and self-authorship. Warm, saturated colour structures the emotional register throughout: red pulsing with strength and continuity, green evoking growth and renewal, blue introducing depth and reflection. Tenderness and bodily intimacy operate as acts of resistance, turning being seen into self-possession.

I came to photography late. In 2018, in my very first series, I went straight to the most personal place I knew: sexual abuse within my family. A mentor saw something in me before I had words for it myself, and told me to work close before speaking wide. So I did. I dove straight into cold water.

I had no visual language yet for what I needed to say. So I started with double exposures, layers placed over layers, images laid on top of one another until something true appeared underneath. That process of layering gave this series its name. Häutungen: the act of shedding skin, of removing what has grown over the wound in order to reach the core.

What I discovered, making this work over years, is that when I tell my own story, I make it possible for others to approach theirs. Everything we can speak about opens pathways. Not necessarily toward healing, but toward contact. And contact is where everything begins.

In Häutungen/Shedding, I use my own body as the primary material. Not to confess. Not to expose. But to choose. I choose tenderness over distance. I choose proximity over the withdrawal that would be so much easier, so much more understandable, given what I carry. That choice is the work.

The images are always made with natural light. Nothing is constructed in advance. I work with whatever light is present, supplemented by found materials: glass, foil, fragments of windows, small and large things gathered without plan. The moment the light appears is the moment that matters, and what results is sometimes explosive, sometimes barely there.

Colour is not accidental here. Red is used deliberately, not to connote love, but to show the complexity of lived experience. It stands in for rage and desire and pain and birth and the blood moving through all of our veins. It is the colour of beginning and the colour of ending simultaneously.

In my next body of work I am focusing on what remains: the traces of touch left behind, what connects us to those already gone, and what we will one day leave on this earth. The questions Häutungen/Shedding opened, I am not finished with. I am only beginning to understand what they are asking. The body does not forget. This next series asks what becomes possible when we choose to remember and to act.