Abdulhamid Kircher’s ‘Rotting from Within’ asks us to keep our eyes attuned to beauty

Abdulhamid Kircher’s Rotting from Within began from a place of purity, evolving from simply spending time with his father “and seeing the world that he was in,” the photographer tells me. “Now that I’ve put out a book, and now that I’ve realised that the way photography or art functions in the world beyond me, it’s become really difficult to make work that feels ‘pure.'”

Kircher was born in Berlin, Germany, and began his photographic journey in 2011. He and his German mother moved to Queens, New York, at the age of eight. Currently between Berlin and Los Angeles, Kircher’s first solo exhibition at carlier | gebauer gallery also marked the publication of Rotting from Within by Loose Joints in 2024. 

As an attempt to understand the generational patterns of trauma and violent behaviour within his family, Kircher spent time first with his father Sedat in Berlin, and later with his grandparents in Turkey, immersing himself in the environment and the family dynamics that shaped his father. It began at 17 when he reconnected with his estranged father and continued for ten years as the project metamorphosed into several iterations. 

The moment the project began to shift for Kircher into a more consciously guided artistic project was when he noticed the relationship between him and his father grow more toxic. Reaching a dead end, he decided to revisit his family in Turkey to spend time with the people that his father grew up with, he explains. Though he had spent much time with his Turkish family, it was Kircher’s first time with them alone. He was primarily exposed to a new sense of his relationship with his grandparents.

“I think I was ready to just feel a bit overwhelmed in a different way,” Kircher recollects. “My grandfather is really intense and can be really miserable to be around. Mentally, I was preparing myself to go a bit crazy. [My grandfather is] so different now than when he was younger, when he was beating my dad, and I’m sure he was 100 times more terrible of a person. But I just wanted to see what it would feel like to live with this person, day to day, and see how mentally he was breaking me down.” If Kircher couldn’t get his dad to open up about his feelings, then he’d need to go to the source. 

These feelings of suffocation translate into photographs where we see Kircher’s grandparents arguing, where we’re embroiled in the altercation. In another photo, Kircher captures his grandfather sitting on his bed from far away, seen through the doorways of both the living room and the bedroom – though he might not be close, he is still watching. A pervading sense of being seen also permeates throughout the rest of the book. Kircher manages to elicit an uncomfortably, through lighting and composition.  

The images are multifaceted to an almost infinite extent but always remain haunted by unmoving anger and anxiety, even though there are interruptions of beauty, joy, and lightness in several instances. Kircher’s eye attempts to dig into the very psyche of his subjects, and it’s a feeling we inherit from him. We stare deep into the eyes of his father illuminated by neon green lights, and we watch a sheep having its throat cut – within Kircher’s frame, there is no running away. Kircher also manages to “capture these really subtle, calm moments – even the ones of [my grandfather] swimming in the ocean. He is very quiet, but then he can also be talking about the same things for days on end, about religion and going to hell. Images like these are really important to me,” he says.

The project also takes the form of a film, Noch Ein Kind (Still a Kid), 2024, made by Kircher’s childhood friend Maxi Hachem, where we see some of these photos play out in real time. They give a new dimension to the work and involve us further in Kircher’s family. The film is thorough, giving deep stories about each of the characters of the family, and sometimes, we feel like we know almost too much. But Kircher is unapologetic about his brazenness. 

Kircher’s work asks larger questions about how far the lens can go, and how much it is able to – or should – capture of a person. “Naturally, I’m going to be seeing [my dad] from a certain viewpoint, and that’s where you get those tender moments,” Kircher says. “This is how I like to see him. And he’s not always this aggressive person.” The images take us into very personal places, usually reserved for only the most intimate family members and sometimes not even for them. We are allowed to watch family members praying and practising their faith, we find Kutty laying bare on a bed, and we candidly stumble upon family members sleeping. But Kircher is able to show us these private places with an understanding that his camera is only ever his own, and interpretation is not his burden to carry. 

“My photography, at the end of the day, is still my viewpoint and how I see the world and how I perceive the world. That’s what makes photography so problematic because it’s so one-sided, in a way,” Kircher continues. “Once you come to terms with realising that photography functions this way in the world, that’s the first step for me to just accept it. I can’t focus on that [problematic] aspect because then it will never allow me to be in the moment and just take photos as they’re happening because I’m too caught up in what this means.”

Photography is Kircher’s safety net, a vehicle to protect himself as he’s involving himself in emotionally – sometimes physically – demanding environments. “What I quickly realised when spending time with my dad was that, even though we were having all these really destructive arguments and I was seeing a lot of intense things, like people taking drugs or people getting beat up, the camera was a way for me to separate myself from those things in the moment,” he tells me. But these moments would inevitably catch up with the photographer when he was writing in his diary or writing about the work, and the feelings that surfaced from the project are ones he’s still working through today. 

In some instances, the camera provides a buffer, allowing him to detach and process the intense emotions. Yet, it also serves as a way for Kircher to connect deeply with his subjects and engage in their lives beyond observation. For many of us born in the diaspora, the creative process is one enacted in a bid to understand our families better, who are often removed either by geography, culture, language, or generation – or all of these things. 

Kircher is like one of many diasporic photographers who use photography to spend time with his grandparents in the homeland: “all these things I don’t think I would have explored if it weren’t for photography. I don’t know how much time I would have spent with my grandparents or with my family in Turkey – we don’t even speak the same language. So many situations that I don’t think I would have been put into or explored if it weren’t for photography,” he tells me. Kircher’s awareness of photography’s inherent limitations shines through his ability to use photography in a dual manner.

Beyond his father and grandfather, Kircher’s work touches on his broader family history, including his grandmother’s experiences as an immigrant in Germany, adapting to a new culture while subtly hiding aspects of her own. The archival family images, often marred by time, represent fragmented memories and the often incomplete nature of family history. 

Kircher describes his father stealing many childhood photographs only for them to be ruined in a basement flood after his father refused to give Kircher’s mother – who was 15 when she gave birth – before she fled to America. Kircher admits trying to piece together a fragmented family history, relying on what little he has to rely on by way of an archive. 

This is why the first photo in the book is so important to Kircher and introduces us to the project. It shows the photographer as a baby, his father leaning over him in a protective and loving gesture. “We ended up finding this other photograph of my mother and I, from when I was first born. But before that, this was the only image that I had ever seen of myself as a newborn,” Kircher tells me. “When I go to different family members’ houses, they’ll let me dig through their archives and pull out anything that I want or am interested in. It’s been weird to regather memories.” 

Though the work follows a patriarchal lineage, the women in the book, and especially in the film, take a guiding role in unexpected ways. Kircher’s grandmother speaks at length about the abuse she endured, wedded at 12 years old to his grandfather. Kircher’s mother is present too, importantly inserting her agency over her narrative in a project that would otherwise risk, like so many before it, emitting voices of female abuse survivors. The women of Kircher’s life are photographed in quiet moments, without too much distraction, opting for black and white in most instances, letting their spirit shine through. 

“All these women that you see in the book, or within my family, they’re the backbone of everything. They really keep so much of these things together,” Kircher tells me. “There’s only one photo of [my mother] in this book. She’s so important to the narrative. But I didn’t want to rope her in. I didn’t want to use her as a token in the book. I didn’t want her to function as this person who suffered at the abuse of my father.” Hands are central to the work for this reason, reflecting an instrument for both care and cruelty. Visually, Kircher finds hands fascinating; the ways a hand wraps around someone’s body or face, such as the scene where an anonymous hand pats Kircher’s father’s head, when an optometrist checks his eyes, or when one of Kircher’s aunts is presented in a series of hand gestures telling a story and pleading with her hands pressed together.  

The way the work is presented in his exhibition reflects Kircher’s desire for that purity he found central to the beginning of the project and which he’s nostalgic for. In the exhibition, he avoided using only polished frames or glass-covered photos, preferring to also exhibit prints that showed the marks of his handling. This tactile approach was a way to convey the deeply personal and unfiltered nature of his experience. Elements of smudges, fingerprints, and unprotected prints serve to bridge the gap between viewer and artist, grounding the work in its emotional and physical reality, the way a painter shows his materiality and presence with visible brush strokes, he tells me, whereas the photographer always remains as anonymous and detached as a spectre. 

Now, Kircher is returning to a project he initially shot in 2013 and never pursued further. With new eyes, he’s working on his series of photographs exploring his time in the Marine Corps Cadets, titled T, after the series’ protagonist, Tony. The project similarly explores themes of power and masculinity. 

Kircher feels he needed to go through Rotting from Within’s entangled and borderline traumatic process. Though he knew “how shitty [his] dad was and how terrible of a person he was,” he needed to experience it himself: and the result is a project that spans multiple generations, forms of media, and questions about photography and family. Though there is heaviness present, it is visually arresting and aesthetically brilliant. Rotting from Within asks us not to look away from the painful, because the most beautiful things might be lurking there.