In the Dark, Benita Suchodrev Hunts Paradise

IN IMAGES

Born in the Soviet Union and raised in suburban America before immersing herself in Berlin’s nightlife, Benita Suchodrev publishes Find Me Paradise with Kehrer Verlag. A book that recomposes twenty years of archives into dark, unsettling image pairs, in search of a light.

By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Benita Suchodrev.

The book grabs you from its opening pages. “An eye, a bird, a cherub, a sea monster,” writes author Simon Bainbridge, before noting that no logical thread unites them beyond a shared sense of dislocation. He goes on to describe one pairing: “A woman lies naked in an awkward pose, a broken doll atop a bare mattress.”

Benita Suchodrev owns this vertigo. Trained in art history and then English literature in the United States, she finds in Berlin a vantage point rather than a source of unease, fed by her immersion in its nightlife and underground art scene.

Her raw, unflinching images capture, in the publisher’s own words, “flashes of memory rooted in raw, unflinching realism…,” according to Kehrer Verlag. “Shifting between extremes, the surprising compositions cross the line between the beautiful and the grotesque,” the publisher adds.

Berlin’s images plunge us, as Bainbridge puts it, “head first into the vices of the city.” A man relieves himself beneath a huge extraction pipe, almost animal-like, paired with a photograph of a kettle whose spout and handle echo, almost comically, the scene opposite.

One of the oldest images in the book, a school of fish circling endlessly in an aquarium, sat in the photographer’s archive for twenty years before she rediscovered it during lockdown. Suchodrev sees in it a precise terror, that of “a promenade where people walk mechanically, like they’ve been switched on, and that horrifies me,” she says.

Her work echoes that of Anders Petersen and his Café Lehmitz, the essayist notes, sharing the same affinity for souls on the margins. Other, gentler images sharpen the unease by contrast: a fawn’s wide eyes facing the camera, a sleeping lamb, a column of light piercing the clouds, almost an Annunciation. “Paradise isn’t reached. It is searched for,” concludes Benita Suchodrev. In the depths of a Berlin club or in a child’s soft gaze, to each their own path.