Sophie Mercedes Koechert

Sophie Mercedes Koechert is an Austrian photographer whose work moves between documentary observation and poetic condensation.

Her series where the cinders settle was created during a several-week artist residency in Ghana. On the beaches of Accra, Koechert encountered a coastal landscape where natural beauty and the effects of global consumption directly overlap: plastic waste and discarded clothing have become part of everyday life. Each week, tons of secondhand clothing from the Global North arrive in Ghana; the Or Foundation¹ estimates around 15 million garments weekly, roughly 40 percent of which cannot be reused and end up as non-biodegradable textile waste on landfills and, via waterways, on the beaches. Koechert does not confront this reality with documentary accusation. Her photographs remain observational while atmospherically dense, tracing unexpected formal connections between waste and landscape: washed-up fabric recalling the skeleton of an animal, or a young rider vanishing into the pre-dawn haze and smoke of a burning stick, wrapped in scraps of clothing and plastic. The horsemen themselves are no fiction: they offer rides to tourists along the shore and belong, like the waste, to the everyday image of the coast. As a European photographer, Koechert remains aware of her own position, meeting what she sees with a deliberately restrained gaze. Her images do not moralize; they show a landscape of great beauty in which the discarded has long become part of daily life, almost indistinguishable from nature itself. Through light, blur, and a diffuse visual language, things lose their clarity, resulting in a series at once poetic and unsettling: a meditation on beauty and destruction, consumption and transience. ¹ A non-profit organization active at the intersection of environmental justice, education, and sustainable fashion.