I spent most of yesterday going through a few books I’d like to review for the blog. One volume I kept on flicking through is Cellina von Mannstein’s Imperfect, recently published by teNeues. I’m mesmerised by the lack of clean perfections in her work and by the way she can find beauty in flaws and transform ordinary moments of life through her lens.
Born in 1975 in Düsseldorf, Cellina von Mannstein graduated from the Bavarian Academy of Advertisement in Munich and started working in the film industry. Soon, though, she realised her true vocation was photography and discovered she had a passion for recounting a story through images. 
Working from Hamburg she started collaborating with various international publications, from Stern to Tank and i-D and, after a brief stint in New York as Terry Richardson’s assistant photographer, Cellina moved to Milan in 2003. The recipient of various international photography awards, Cellina was also named one of the “New Photographers 2006” at the Cannes Film Festival. Her photographs appeared in advertisement campaigns, fashion photo shoots and at various exhibitions in art galleries.
Imperfect is a brief but striking compendium of her work. Every image seems to be regulated by a certain aesthetic of confusion and by a deep sense of decadence. By flicking through the images featured in the book you can easily spot Cellina’s background in film production as every image seems to tell a story, at times violent, at others scary, but always mesmerising or mysterious. All the pictures have a special energy and passion; physicality assumes a great importance in her art, but also that imperfect perfection, that dichotomic quality all her images have.
The book opens with a picture of a group of elderly nuns, their innocence and smiling faces contrasting with the ebullience of some of the nudes that follow. The portraits of transvestites are maybe among the most beautiful ones in the book as some of them seem to have a sort of sadness and longing in their eyes. Horses are often featured in Cellina’s images and appear as entities living inside chaotic houses together with human beings or rambling around crazy banquets.
The volume also features forewords by Tom Jacobi and Terry Richardson: both the photographers remember how they first met Cellina and how they immediately spotted her talent. Richardson gets the merit of having understood that Cellina’s main skill stands in her ability of telling a story through her photographs and in managing to convey through her portraits the most disparate feelings, from happiness to sadness.
This might be a slim volume, but if you consider the story behind every image, you will realise it’s also an anthology of short tales about different characters, some intriguing, others despicable, some loving, others hateful, yet all equally imperfectly perfect enough to inhabit Cellina’s world.
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