While in Israel in April 2012 she began using Instagram as casual photo diary. Later her understanding of this photo community changed slightly, she saw it as her own gallery and started selecting and curating more strongly. Instagram for her became “a place to highlight my work and reach a bigger network”. Linka, who has taken photos for 23 years now, is enthustiastic about the increasing quality of tools like Instagram or VSCO through which she is convinced our perceptions change. “Above all they make beauty visible through their immediacy”, she says. Additionally she admits it is “very encouraging to have a larger audience liking my work.”
Originally Linka studied free art before she realized that she was searching for something else – finally she found her calling behind the camera. She remembers well: “It was the first time that I felt I was good at something and I enjoyed it.” On her travels around the globe she was constantly writing in her diary and until now has amassed a lot of scripts that she would like to use for her first book to be entitled “Creekwalking” – a face off with her childhood in Texas and the American Dream.
Her style is influenced by classic photo stories. She often works with extreme light, in the evening and at night, and depicts people meditating, taking part in religious rituals or just standing under the wide sky. Even though she has never seen herself as a portraitist, she has a very good eye for faces and situations. In her pure landscapes, which are often deserts, she studies the structure of those places saying, “I have been inspired by nature ever since I was a kid”.
@themissinglinka really deserves the label globetrotter, for she has travelled to 37 countries, among them Bolivia, Turkey, India, Nepal, Canary Islands, Morocco. If she had a wish, her next destinations would be: Iceland and Mongolia. This June she is traveling to Greece to document the changing face of the country, in the past she has documented an abandoned hotel in New Jersey, worked with a charity in India for Getty Creative Grants, worked on a series about the harvesting of Cannabis in California – and she believes that now in Berlin, she has found a home base which inspires happiness.
@themissinglinka’s favourite Igers:
@goldeyes, @colerise, @Kat_in_nyc and @Ledewitt
