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There is much silence in Caroline Hörmann's photos. But this silence is not mute. It rings out of the people's faces - all of them young, but with a timeless other-worldliness -, it is suspended vibrantly between their bodies and the buildings - all derelict, but with a fading presence -, swathing everything in endless fragility.
They look at us, these other-worldly beings, while we look at them after the camera has looked at them and long turned its gaze elsewhere. They are still looking, chimeras, sphinxes, whose gazes remain impenetrable and divulge nothing but their mysterious fragility, which outlasts all time, and once, in the mirror of the camera, met their creator's gaze, and had from her that stillness breathed into them that prowls, panther-like, around the cage of their lasting hurt. A fragility that is not allowed to crumble, as the buildings that surround them as ruins do, a vulnerability that may not set off injured and bleed to death. Endlessly sustained tension without cracking. Unredeemed. Eternal. Tempered tenderness. In pictures of crystal clarity.

Fred Kelemen, November 2013, Berlin