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Antonia Mayer photographs her own family in the Vienna suburb of Tulln in the series Zahn für Zahn — images made across two decades alongside a poem by Rosa Cass.
"If Cass made images, they might look like Mayer's; and if Mayer wrote poems, they could read like Cass's." The argument is worth testing against what is actually in the work.
Antonia Mayer's series Zahn für Zahn (German for "Tooth for Tooth"), moves through documentary observation of daily life with what Ariel calls "tenderness in texture and ruggedness in content." A close-up of a newborn's neck and cheek, dew-like drops on the skin. A child in a floral dress with rubber boots and a leaf mask standing in a dark wood. A hand pressed to a lit glass panel, red light saturating the fingers. A sponge stuck through with blue-headed pins. A small body looking up from a beach as the photographer's shadow falls across the shells. These are images of care, mortality, and the private textures of being alive — not illustrative, not symbolic, simply present.
a paired poem by Rosa Cass, reproduced in the feature as a printed page, teaches sorrow by walking through it: "When do you meet sorrow / Where do you learn sorrow / How do you teach sorrow." The final stanza's refrain ("Wait until until until until until until / Ready or not") is the penny-drop moment Ariel identifies: a title that becomes the invisible last line. The poem was written from Naarm (Melbourne), and carries grief for ancestors alongside the dailiness of a child asking about a dead bird on the road.
The structural parallel Ariel names is cyclical rhythm: "an inhale, an exhale" in Mayer's series title Zahn für Zahn, a pattern the viewer learns and then watches break, just as Cass's poem builds and defers. The offbeat images in Mayer's sequence (a snake coiled on lichened rock, an eye banded with medical tape, a burning match-flame hand) do not pair with anything in the poem and are not supposed to. They are the rupture inside the rhythm.
Mayer describes the particular weight of becoming a parent: knowing the world is pure and strong through a child's eyes and simultaneously knowing how brutal it is, and that it is her job to hold both truths. "Maybe this is what Mayer means too," Ariel writes, after noting that Cass often feels "heavy with love." The gallery includes the scanned poem page because the editorial decision to give both texts equal presence is itself part of what the pairing argues: that some kinds of understanding arrive without translation.
