Uta Neumann

I was shocked and pulled the car over. She said, "Maybe you should go for a hike in the mountains, then you'll be a bit closer to him. We'll wait till you're back for the funeral."

My Grandfather lived alone in a huge house I had visited when I was a kid in summer. It smelt like a mixture of mould, cold cigarette smoke, leather and this beef soup my Grandmother cooked as an entrée for lunch.

She always claimed, "This house is too big for us," and I nodded because I always felt like it was a big coffin: dark, cold and damp. My Grandmother felt that she had to keep an eye on it, so she barely left it. When she died, 10 years before my Grandfather, he started to fix all the things she had asked him for. Both were somehow trapped in this house. Too many rooms, too much to do, and nobody really liked it.

When my Grandfather died, my Mum wanted to sell it straight away because no-one in the family wanted to live there. I had an impulse to take pictures before they started to clear the space. So I did. Right before the new owner came I took another round of pictures, the house empty and sad. Somehow it was my way of saying goodbye. It's a shame that one can't capture smell with pictures. But one can imagine, maybe.

After a while of taking pictures of the house and the interior, I felt more and more that they were becoming a portrait of my Grandfather, who tried the best he could to make his wife happy, but what never really worked out.

During the first Christmas after my Grandfather died, I started to take portraits of my family. Everyone was still kind of in shock. My Mum was really sad, but never said a word about how she struggled. I guess the portraits were the best way for me to deal with the situation: being sad, seeing my family members so sad, and still not being able to talk about our feelings.

For me, these pictures show great strength and vulnerability at the same time. I feel very honoured that my family were ok with revealing their nakedness to me, while retaining their pride and their personalities.

This work is about my family, but also about dealing with a situation we all experience at some point in our lives. It is very personal and universal at the same time.