Artist Blog: Otto Steinert

Otto Steinert is a German photographer, born in Saarbracken in 1915 and is most famously known for his outstanding personality of German post-war photography. He started, however, as a physician, and graduated with a medicine degree in 1939. After the war, he started taking photographs on the side of his regular job and eventually gave up his profession to follow his pasion for photography. Here is one of his ppieces i have found most interesting and inspirational in reference to my own work. It is titled simply "Pedestrians Foot" and is a silver gelating print created in 1950. This piece represents to me the feeling of displacement and this belending of two identities. The full foot form would represent my original and hidden identity, the blending is the part of me trying to co-exist with the world around me, a completely different lifestyle and way of thinking. The key for this piece is that it embodies and resembles my own work , and being that i am focusing back to the idea of constrcting something and trying to find what "Kenya" is to me, what is that object or idea, it give me thoughts of what i thought was a blessing to have, an object so simple, yet said too much in its owning, and that is shoes. Shoes are just one of the objects that i feel separated my childhood and Kenya from here.
Everything here is "shirt and shoes required" here, whereas in Kenya, even being more filthy, dangerous, and painful to walk on with bare feet, i rarely wore shoes outside of school, and the rest of the time i hwas barefoot. I could even go into stores with bare feet, whith no issue or second thought from anyone. Every once in a while i would walk without shoes on here, and people would flip out, and go crazy. This separation between the two highly contrasting positions bring about good thoughts and i look forward to finding more deep objects that resemble differences and contrasts throughout life.

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