CONNY MARSHAUS AND HER FISH FAMILY

photographer and outdoor enthusiast Conny Marshaus and her drop dead gorgeous fish family striked out to the surf & skate festival in munich earlier this year. get to know how Conny put her photographs on her favourite material wood and which surface is her favourite to move along.

how's your summer so far? 

pretty awesome! at the moment I am in Thuringia in a small village called Löbi, where my family lives. so far it’s been a pretty exciting year for me with lots of traveling and work.

please tell us about your exhibition at the surf & skate festival. 

Flo, one of the founders of the surf & skate festival came across my lifestyle photos featuring some surf shots on my website and asked if I want to show my photos at the skate & surf art exhibition this year. I didn’t hesitate a second and said "yeah, for sure".

a couple of months prior the exhibition I already had the idea to print some of my favourite photos on skateboard decks. unfortunately it just stayed a rough concept without excecution because I was too busy with work.
I finally got to realize my idea at the surf & skate art exhibition, but instead of skateboard decks, I envisioned fish-like shapes, cut out of wood, that would serve as canvas for selected photos of mine. my brainchild "the fishfamily" for the exhibition was born.
every member of my fishfamily is one of a kind. each has a unique layout of photos, shapes and graphics printed on its surface. after I hung all ten members on the wall with ropes at the exhibition I noticed they look like fish cought in a fishing net.

how did you produce the fish boards? 

I found a company that was able to print photos on wood by using a printing method called UV direct printing. UV printers cure the ink with a series of ultraviolet lamps, causing the ink on the wooden surface to be dry almost immediately after the print head has passed.
they printed my layouts on a large piece of spruce wood. with the help of my amazing carpenter boyfriend Andreas Reiber I cut the printed board into ten fish-shapes.

it's not the first time that you've worked with uncommon substrates for your photography. please tell us more about your affection for putting your images on different materials.
I love it how different materials come together and how they merge. first I started with polaroid-transfers with my 320 landcamera. normally you do the transfer onto watercolor paper but it worked fairly good on forex plates as well as wooden boards. it was important for me that you can still see the wooden structure through the pictures.
at the moment I still like to work with wood, because there are so many different kinds of wood with various patterns, structure and color, that gives each photo a uniqe background.

w – wild
o – original
o - object
d – drop-dead gorgeous

on which surfaces do you personally prefer to move along?
in the summertime I love to be on a horse and in wintertime definitely in the mountains, just being around with my friends in the snow. these are my favourite moments.