Rafael Heygster is a freelance photographer based in Hannover, Germany. From 2010 to 2015 he stu­died cultural anthropology and political sciences at the Uni­ver­sity of Hamburg. Since 2015 he studies photojournalism and documentary photography at the Uni­ver­sity of App­lied Sci­en­ces and Arts Hannover and at DMJX in Aarhus. In his longterm projects, he focu­ses on the relation between individuals and their social, cultural and political environment. His works have been awarded and exhbitited  internationally.

CORONA RHAPSODY, 2020-2021

“Like Freddy Mercury asks in Bohemian Rhapsody „Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?“ I have often been confronted with the questions of what is actually happening around us and where the border between fantasy and reality lies, since the outbreak of the global Corona pandemic. In the beginning, the situation felt to me like a surreal dream. I combine different aspects and scenarios happening during Covid-19 in Germany and show the tension between public life, the infrastructural apparatus behind it and the people who move in this space. I have chosen a theatrical pictorial aesthetic to play with our ideas of pandemic and crisis our surreal feelings and also the self-inscination of institutions.

My aim is not to bring out the individuality of the people photographed but rather to show them like film characters or avatars in video games.
With „Corona Rhapsody“ I want to show and question how the current pandemic is presented by media and perceived in public, to what extent this coincides with subjective experiences,  how it is possibly instrumentalised for political purposes and how we will remember the corona crisis in future.”

Rafael Heygster