Quark, Milch, Schinken

QUARK, MILCH, SCHINKEN (Quark, Milk, Ham) is a photographic project about an extraordinary relationship between two women that shaped a family’s everyday life for decades. In pictures and texts, the photobook tells of care, reliability and the quiet closeness between my grandmother Leonore and the housekeeper Frau Bolle.

This photo project is dedicated to my grandmother Leonore and to Frau Bolle. It is an attempt to make visible a relationship that shaped a family’s daily life over decades: quiet, constant and full of mutual respect.

Frau Bolle has worked in our household for more than fifty years. She accompanied several generations, looked after my grandmother’s children, ran the household, cooked, organised and was always there. My grandmother had four children, several of whom contributed texts to this book. Their memories, observations and small everyday stories complement the photographs and give an insight into a family life that would have been unthinkable without Frau Bolle.

At the heart of the project is the special relationship between my grandmother and Frau Bolle. All their lives they addressed each other with the formal “Sie”, and yet they built a deep, familiar and intense bond. A relationship expressed not in big words but in rituals, reliability, shared meals and everyday life. Lunch together at 12:30, carefully planned and lovingly prepared, became the fixed anchor of the day. Conversation, silence, routine: all of this formed a closeness beyond the usual categories of family or work.

The photobook documents this relationship in pictures and texts. It tells of care, respect and mutual trust, of invisible work and emotional connection. At the same time, it is a document about housework, gender roles and the quiet work of people who often stay in the background but are indispensable to a life and a family.

With this project I want to make Frau Bolle visible and create a memorial to my grandmother Leonore, while honouring a relationship that stands for many similar, often unseen ways of living together.

My grandmother died on 3 January 2026.