As soon as you step into fine-art photographer Esther Teichmann’s lovely light-filled, perfectly appointed flat in Kennington, south London, it is obvious that she is a) very nice and b) very brainy. She is a sweetheart, quickly offering a variety of herbal teas and preparing a bowl of popcorn before settling down to speak to me across an antique table by the window. Her dainty white bookshelves are filled with academic and intelligent tomes – there is lots of 20th-century French philosophy as well as novels, essays and poetry that suggest a thoughtful reader concerned primarily with love – and it’s almost demoralising how many times you have to say ‘Hmm I’m not sure I’ve read that one’ or ‘I haven’t got to that exhibition yet’ as she talks about her influences and references, the things that move her and interest her.

Her work though is neither sweet nor overtly brainy. It’s sexy and sexual, primal and honest, beautiful and troubling. Her photographs – nudes set against nature, mainly – get to the heart of what it is to be human: to be a woman or a man, a mother or a father, a sister, a daughter, a brother, a son, a lover.

‘That relationship between sisters and the mother’s body is something that has been in the work since the beginning,’ she says ‘I grew up with two sisters and I’m really close to them and their children. I grew up in a very female-oriented household even though my father was present. I’m the middle child and we always slept in the same bed. It’s interesting: since they became mothers, there’s a sense of sharing children or sharing the love for children, it’s like an extension of being sisters.’ Indeed some of her most affecting work depicts her sisters with their children, beautiful nude women and fat-bellied children juxtaposed against trees and swamps.

Why does she always choose to photograph her subjects nude, I wonder. ‘It’s several things,’ she says. ‘For a long time I was working just with my mother and partner and I was interested in this slippage between bodies – the mother’s body and the lover’s body being the two that you are most afraid of losing, and that are the most threatened in a way. You will inevitably be separated from them at some point, through death or through separation. I’ve always been interested in eroticism and desire that isn’t just sexual. I’m also interested in work that is slightly outside of time or place, in trying to have this fantastical, almost mythological space, and obviously bodies aren’t coded.

She pauses. ‘There is something cultural too maybe: I love going to saunas and steam rooms. I grew up swimming in lakes naked.’ 

‘That’s very German,’ I say.

‘It’s totally German,’ she says, laughing, before clarifying: ‘It’s not the “nudist” tradition of Germany I’m talking about; it’s more about kids swimming in underpants.’

Teichmann, 33, grew up in the Rhine Valley, the daughter of an American mother and a German father, both academics, so she calls herself German-American but her nationality is harder to pin down than that. 

‘Germany, that house, that lake, that forest is home to me, no question but I don’t feel 100 per cent German. I grew up with parents who rejected any form of nationalism: obviously my father’s generation of Germans are super-conscious and are, rightly so, anxious about nationalism and pride. And my mother’s generation of Americans is quite critical of that too. I went to a European school funded by the EU and then, in the early 1990s, it was drummed into us that we’re European citizens and there aren’t borders, we’re different cultures but we’re one.’  

She moved to England to study art in 1998 – ‘I came to study at Kent and it was just magical, falling in love, being away from home, doing life-drawing, learning from older art students’ – and has more or less stayed here ever since. After completing a degree in photography she worked for Rankin, when he was still based at the Dazed & Confused offices (‘A really exhausting year but also really eye-opening. I learned so much’ she says), before going on to an MA and a PhD at the Royal College of Art, and now she manages to pursue a successful academic career alongside side her work as an artist.

The themes of her work and its overriding aesthetic have not varied wildly since she started snapping her family as a teenager; the subjects however have changed. She was married for ten years so back then she used to photograph her husband a lot; her later work, work undertaken since her separation, has concentrated more on women and the autoerotic. 

Towards the end of the interview, as we discuss Blue is the Warmest Colour, a film we both love, she tells me something that grants her work an almost unbearable poignancy. ‘I suppose in a way underpinning all the work is at the end of that magical foundation year, the first relationship, this amazing love I’d had – he died really suddenly in a car crash,' she says. 'So I know that helplessness, there’s nothing you can do and you know there’s nothing you can do. Other than just keep living until you’re alive again. You just keep living until you’re alive again. There’s a numbness and you have to give into that and not be afraid of that.’ She articulates it beautifully, of course, because she is a) very nice, b) very brainy and c) somebody who seems to really truly know what it is to be human.   

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Esther Teichamann's 'Fractal Scars, Salt Water and Tears' is at Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road, London E2 until May 10. A special signed limited edition 8x10 inch C-type print of the book that accompanies the exhibition is available during the exhibition for £100 from the gallery and the Esther Teichmann spbh book club Volume V launch takes place on Saturday May 10,from 4-6pm, at the Self Publish Be Happy pop-up bookshop.