About me

Tabea MartenArtistic Position & Practice

 

I understand my photographic practice as an ongoing process of deconstruction.

My point of departure is the craftsmanship and trained eye of commercial portrait photography. For more than two decades, my work focused on portraying people with precision, refinement, and control. The independent artistic practice that has emerged from this background is not a departure from it, but rather its logical continuation through critical inquiry. Where commissioned work demands perfection, my artistic practice is drawn to the fragile, the fractured, and the unembellished act of documentation.

During the development of my bodies of work in Istanbul and Cape Town, I became increasingly aware of the power structures inherent in the act of photographing. The unsolicited appropriation of another person’s image—the act of entering someone else’s reality through the lens—revealed itself to me as an ethical boundary. Rather than abandoning the work, this realization transformed it. The anonymization of subjects and the move away from conventional street photography became central artistic concerns in themselves.

If the person in front of the camera must be protected from the intrusiveness of the gaze, the logical consequence is to turn that gaze upon myself.

In my current series, Fragments — From Me to We?, I use self-portraiture as a means of radical self-exploration. I investigate the scars of isolation, societal pressure, and the loss of innocence and openness. My personal experience is not presented as an isolated endpoint, but as a necessary point of departure. Only through exposing my own vulnerability can I create an expansive invitation to dialogue.

My work does not seek definitive answers. Instead, it creates spaces in which experience can be shared—without judgment, without embellishment, and in all its many facets.