Marina Mónaco’s I Saw You in a Song and its latest photo book sequel starkly document the heartbreaks, friendships and enchantments of European youth culture
“I never felt I belonged, but I am very thankful for that,” says Argentinian-born photographer Marina Mónaco. Recalling her time in Buenos Aires and feeling like an outsider, she continues, “It’s the origin of my work – a need for belonging – that I reflect in my photos.” Now based in Berlin, Mónaco has spent recent years travelling across Leipzig, Cologne, the Netherlands and beyond, taking portraits of suburban youth cultures across Europe. “I introduce myself by saying, ‘I’m from the other end of the world’ when I meet people, so they understand where I come from.”
These travels were chronicled in Mónaco’s I saw you in a song (2023) – a photo book and exhibition exploring rites of passage such as falling in love, heartbreak, friendship and enchantment. Its recent sequel, I saw you in a song: an anti-memoir (published this month) is a continuation of these themes, bringing together the artist’s photographs of young people in European city suburbs and compiling the fragments of ephemera which inform her documentary work, such as her diaries, letters, and cassette mixtapes.
Throughout Neue Welle, the main photo series featured in both books, Mónaco developed a signature style that sits at the point where documentary photography encounters the stark aesthetic of late 70s and early 80s Berlin, drawn to intriguing transitory places such as backstage areas and motel rooms. Contemplating her outsider’s perspective of the city, she says, “Born here, I wouldn’t have been able to see it this way, not even in the former new wave scene.” Without speaking the same language or understanding the lyrics to their songs, she became close to the artists within the contemporary German new wave scene – known as Neue Neue Deutsche Welle – turning this distance into a source of inspiration for her work.
A sense of shared references and influences allowed her photography to grow and form a joint narrative with this movement, “I think I discovered complementarity with the artists because they found in my photography the visual dimension of what they were trying to express through sound,” she explains of the raw, black and white style of photography she developed after moving to Berlin.
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The series of portraits in both photo books trace her ongoing collaboration with German musician and muse Nils Keppel. “He is the artist with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working more closely,” she says. Having documented his career since the start, she reflects, “I realised how much we – and also everyone around me, my friends – have grown right after photographing Keppel’s last concert at Berlin’s SO36 – a venue where artists like Nick Cave played in the early 80s.”
According to Mónaco, trust in her intuition and collaboration is what keeps the DIY, low-fi essence of her practice intact. “I like the limited, the special,” she explains, “to know that the people who get it get it.” Reflecting on her work as a kind of ongoing manifesto or time capsule of her generation, she concludes, “You don’t think about it now, but tomorrow, who knows if even I will exist? It doesn’t matter, the book will be somewhere, telling the story of this moment.”
I saw you in a song and I saw you in a song: an anti-memoir (both edited and art directed by Sofia Mastrogiacomo and Julieta Colantonio) are available to buy here. The official launches of I saw you in a song: an anti-memoir will take place in Berlin on May 24 at Be Safe Studios and in New York on June 8 at Contact Photo.
