I met Conny as I left the station, I was waiting for a friend outside when she walked by, and I stopped her asking if I could photograph her. It was a hot day during Berlin summer, but as life goes on and reroutes our paths, we only met some time in November; the sweltering temperatures had iced, the winter had arrived.

Her apartment was in a charming old building in Neukölln, she told me she moved in long ago. She has been a social worker for many years and seemed satisfied and tired, that kind of work is rewarding and taxing, she said. Conny is beautiful, of course, she’d had a hard road, for reasons of privacy I won’t get into that, yet what I found so enigmatic about her was not only her beauty and gentleness, but a certain kind of wisdom and melancholy in her eyes. It was real, raw light that came through her, and with it, a darkness.