The photography project Küss den Frosch¹ represents acceptance. It is the journey of a woman who has lost her hair, bound to live in a society where hair is a symbol of femininity, seduction and identity.
This journey is an ordinary pursuit of happiness. She wants to feel beautiful, to be attractive to others, as if this was the formula to happiness. Only later does she realize that she is already beautiful and that happiness did not depend on her appearance.
She starts to reexamine her life, specifically her childhood and realises that her way of thinking was mistaken. It becomes a long search for identity. In the end, she understands something revolutionary: that it is always possible to change perspective. She had to give herself permission.
¹ A scene from the fairy tale The Princess and the Frog by the Brothers Grimm.
Polly Hummel, born 1975 in the GDR, is a photographer and artist. She has been living and working in Porto, Portugal.
Her pictures tell only part of a story. A detail sheds a little light on this story, the rest remains in darkness.
The visual language is poetic. She like it when it remains abstract and slightly eerie, without a definitive place and time. There are both, staged moments in which she can step out of reality, as well as everyday life which capture a kind of honesty. With preference using analog film in black and white or color. The two themes are interwoven throughout her life story. All stories carry their own specific spirit. Feelings of loneliness, vulnerability and the search for happiness and identity are experienced every day.
With the current project, Küss den Frosch, which was developed during the Master course in Artistic Photography at the Instituto de Producao Cultural & Imagem in Porto 2019-2020, Polly Hummel had her first exhibition in November 2020 in Porto and the 2nd in Lisbon 2021. She was awarded the HONOURFUL MENTION prize at the Fnac New Talents photography award and she was Bronze Winner in the Editorial Personality category at BIFA.
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