Katrin KOENNING: Little mount II

2026 MAPh Photography Fair

Katrin KOENNING 
born Germany 1978; arrived Australia 2003
Little mount II  2018
from the series Swell  2010–18
28.4 x 23.8cm
courtesy of the artist
From a limited edition print set for MAPh's 30th anniversary, edition of 7

Katrin Koenning (1978-) 

Katrin Koenning is a leading voice in contemporary Australian photography, with work held in significant public collections. Her practice is recognised for its emotional depth and sustained engagement with the everyday. Working in the documentary tradition, she transforms fields, gardens, domestic interiors, and moments of pause into meditation on time. Koenning approaches photography as a relational encounter, exploring community and kinship through fragmentary and open-ended images. Widely exhibited and published, she won the Bowness Photography Prize in 2019 and earlier that year held a solo exhibition at MAPh entitled Swell. This image is from the Swell series. In Swell, the artist addresses collective states of environmental urgency in which we find ourselves. Avoiding expected tropes of disaster-imagery, the work offers counter-narratives in order to focus on what is at stake and to decipher how humans and nature impact on each other.

This exhibition offered a contemporary response to the tradition of environmental photography of the 1970s and 80s. Koenning proposed a view of nature and wildness that is more psychological than intrepid. Her alluring and unsettling images give us a sense of Earth’s beauty and precariousness.

This special limited edition print was created to commemorate MAPh's 30th anniversary.