Listening, engaging and building stories — with an empathetic approach and a curious mind, the Romania-born Maria Sturm has created compelling narratives through her photography. Focusing on identity and the tensions arising from unsupportive social and cultural structures, her work reveals the nuanced details of communities that exist in the intersection of past and future.
Through her own personal experience, the lingering questions analyse our sense of belonging, perception and acceptance.
Q > What motivated you to start documenting lives with your camera?
A > There wasn’t a key experience that led me to take that decision. I just have always been curious. At age 11, I became curious about the camera and mother gifted me a point and shoot.
Even though it might seem I am focusing on photographing the lives of others, I don’t follow a protocol. I get inspired through conversation and then I follow my curiosity. I can get similarly obsessed about a piece of bend glass as I did about the Birdmen of Istanbul.
I have often taken refuge in the clichéd image of the photographer-as-storyteller. The more I think about this, the more I distrust the adage that a photograph is either telling a story or suggesting a truth. I am more attracted to uncovering interesting questions than to documentation. I am interested in multifaceted photographs, which, while playful, will inspire a story in a person’s mind that helps unearthing universal truths.
Q > What’s the most satisfying part of the creative / documenting process?
A > Listening, learning and being present or essentially the conversation that evolves from engaging with a certain topic. And especially when the conversation is nurturing all parties.
Q > Is work personal to you? Do you keep your work separate from your personal life?
A > My work is personal to me yes but it is definitely not separate from my personal life, it’s the opposite. I also wouldn’t say that I’m different when I work. One body, one mind.
Q > Tell us about moments in your life that helped define or change your identity.
A > I was born in Romania and came to Germany when I was 5 with my mother. Growing up, I was often asked where I came from. As a teenager, and until my twenties, I recall saying “I come from this city”. I was suspicious of the questioner wanting to know about my heritage, telling myself that they were asking me because I looked “different”. I was proven to be right, for the person that was asking, followed up with, “No, I meant where are you really from?” Sometimes this bothered me. Sometimes I did not want to tell because I didn’t want to be any different from anybody else: I am at first a person, not any different than you. I am my mother’s daughter and my grandmother’s child. Why does it matter where I am from? It probably did not even matter to them as they were most likely asking out of curiosity. I should understand this as I am curious, myself, and always have been. For as long as I can remember, I have always asked a lot of questions. Because of this, I became a listener and, I think, a photographer.
Q > Tell us a disturbing or inspiring story you refuse to forget.
A > I had a strong accent when I first learned German; my mother tongue is Romanian (my mother took me to Germany when I was 5). As a child, I was frequently asked: “Please say something with R, Maria, you roll the R so beautifully.” I felt intimidated and mumbled something. Then I got rid of it. I did not force myself to lose the accent, rather, it happened unconsciously. Today I cannot do it anymore, and when I try, it sounds fake. When I speak Romanian I have a German accent now.
I never spoke Romanian again, after we came to Germany. My grandparents, uncle and aunt all spoke only German with me. They were supposed to, and they did, in their heavy accents. Unlike me, they could not just get rid of their accents. But I was constantly exposed to my family speaking Romanian to each other, and I was listening. It felt good when I overcame my timidity and did not care any longer how I sounded, as long as I was able to speak. Ironically, I have a strong German accent when I speak Romanian, which identifies me as a foreigner.
The reception camp we first arrived at had child care, but my mother chose to walk with me 3 kilometres through the woods to bring me to a kindergarten that didn’t have any children with a migration background. These were steps necessary for her to take to secure my chances of speaking accent-free German. She even changed my name, so it wouldn’t sound so I could move into the new world unnoticed and free of any possible stigmas.
My life is not a classical immigrant child story that is torn between two cultures, neither living fully in one nor the other. I never struggled with finding my own identity. Perhaps this is because I never tried to be something that I am not, or because my mother prepared me to blend in.
Q > The greatest challenge you’ve overcome?
A > I think it’s yet to come, since I’m expecting my first child any time now. It took me just until recently to talk publicly about it, mostly because of a shared fear with other women — that work as artists or freelance photographers of not getting any jobs anymore once word gets out that one is having a baby. That fear was challenging and frustrating.
Q > Could you give us an overview of your project ‘You don’t look Native to me’, and tell us which reactions, questions or perception-shifts did you hope to raise in the viewer?
A > The people I met in Pembroke, which is economic, cultural and political centre of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina* all identify as Native American in a country in which being Native is either romanticised or dismissed. They carried their identity on their shirts or on their skin. Tattoos or clothing with Native motifs seem to convey pride, but they also function as proof that they are Native. Unless you are Native yourself, the picture of the “movie Indian” remains what most people know. Even among other Natives, the people of Robeson county have been called not Native enough. This begs the question: what makes you Native? Is it the blood quantum or how close your appearance fits to a preconceived notion of how a Native should look? I was striving to create images that challenge our gridlocked perception and create moments of contradiction that stimulate the viewer’s mind to be aware of the ways in which our perception is working.
My work in general seeks to function as a provocation to view our world as non-binary. I’m hoping that the viewers will be able to abstract and apply this sensitivity to future encounters of any kind: whether they meet a person or come into a situation, they will remember that not everything is how they think it might be.
*The Lumbee tribe is the largest tribe in North Carolina, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River, and the ninth-largest in the USA with their 55000 enrolled members. The tribe is recognised by the state of North Carolina, which means they are federally unrecognised and don’t have a reservation or get any financial support from the United States government.
Q > Challenging conversations, introspective moments, inspirational triggers, political views, social shifts: Which topics do you find yourself debating these days?
A > Political views, social shifts and motherhood.
Maria Sturm was born in 1985 in Ploiești, Romania. She has studied photography at the University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld, Germany, and at the Rhode Island School of Design as a Fulbright and DAAD scholar.
Sturm works both on personal projects and commissioned assignments for publications such as the Wall Street Journal, der Stern, NZZ Folio and ZEITmagazin, and as an educator, having taught at Rhode Island School of Design and Berlin Technische Kunsthochschule. She’s part of the artists collective Apparat and together with a handful of friends organises a small music festival in an old train station just outside Berlin on the border to Poland called Alte Liebe rostet nicht.
With her project You don’t look Native to me, Sturm won the PHmuseum Women Photographers Grant, Center Santa Fe Directors Choice Award and the Royal Photographic Society Award. It was also shortlisted for PhotoLondon La Fabrica Dummy Award, Kassel Dummy Award and made the 2nd place at Unseen Dummy Award and published in the British Journal of Photography, D La Repubblica, Refinery29 and Lensculture.
