Germany

Jordis Antonia Schlösser

www.ostkreuz.de

Biography

Jordis Antonia Schlösser (born 1967, Goettingen) studied photography with Prof. Arno Fischer at the technical college in Dortmund. She first gained public recognition for her diploma "Havanna Between the Times" which was widely exhibited and won the Special prize at the UNESCO Courier/Nikon competition „Peace in Everyday Life“.
Jordis Schlösser became a member of OSTKREUZ agency in 1997 and started working for international magazines such as Geo, National Geographic, Stern or Spiegel. Free projects and magazine reportages have lead her allover the world, from Middle East to Westafrica, Canada or Micronesia, the Caribbean and Australia. She also closely followed the transition in post Sowjet countries which recently joined the European Union such as Poland or the Baltic states.
Jordis Schlösser was selected for the World Press Joop Swart Masterclass in 1998 and won various international awards such as the second prize in World Press Photo in 2002 and was finalist at the Grand Prix Care International du Reportage Humanitaire in 1999.
After a four year stay in Paris, she now lives and works in Berlin.

In her work On the dump; Romania, Jordis Antonia Schlösser describes the everyday life of 400 Roma people, living on the rubbish dump near the city of Klausenburg. After the end of communism and the dissolution of the kolkhozy, many of them had lost their job.

Now they are reduced to living on and of the dump. Here they work, eat and play. They collect everything that they can use: mouldy bread to feed the pigs, scrap metal and glass to sell, plastic to burn for cooking, discarded clothing to wear, and sometimes even food for the family. Some of the kids stay almost all the time on the dump. In the night they are searching in the rubbish with self-made torches. Their parents have no legal papers and therefore they are not entitled to medical care. But even on this wasteland the gypsies are not allowed to stay. In the past the police tried a few times to chase them away and soon the dump is said to be closed. If that happens no one knows where to go.

The photographs were taken during the time she was a nominee in the “World Press Joop Swart Masterclass” in 1998. The next year, in 1999, the pictures were published in GEO magazine.

In Prato they’ve always made fashion, even in the Middle Ages they were working with fabrics. But in the 1990’s, production became too expensive to keep up with international competition. As the old companies closed or moved abroad, the Chinese took over the business. They rented factories and organized textile production according to their own rules. Today in Prato, “pronto moda” is manufactured - cheap clothes that imitate current trends. Around one-quarter of the residents are Chinese; many of them entered the country illegally. They work up to eighteen hours a day, producing clothing “made in Italy,” under the worst working conditions. Made in Italy presents a document of a visit to a divided city.

"East wall": This is how the Polish call their 1230 km long border which separates their country from Russia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians. It's hard to believe that people in Europe could live more secluded as they do in this region, which is in many respects characterized by the near border marking the frontier of the European Union with its neighbours in the east.

Jordis Antonia Schlösser has photographed the new border of the EU. She met unemployed workers, upstarting people, poets and smugglers. One question was present all the time: What is home? Where ever she went, she could sense the memory of this region's trauma in the 20th century: the policy of turnouts and its victims among the Polish, Ukranian, Belarussian and German population of this historically diverse and multiethnical region which finally became part of the European Union on May 1st 2004.