Colourful Buenos Aires

I have waited 7 years for my first trip to Buenos Aires and it finally happened in April 2015. It’s only logical that I would shoot as much as I could while I was there. Since colour features more and more in my work I decided to take a bit of a gamble and shot the whole trip on 50 rolls of colour film. 50 more rolls followed in 2016 and there are now plans for another trip in 2018.

Progress through demolition

Childhood memories are a fascinating subject even when you’re not called Freud. Interestingly I don’t only have wide gaps in my own memories of my earliest years, but the world is seemingly trying to erase any exterior sign of these years as well. Both my primary school and my secondary school were demolished, as well as the house where I spent the first 7 or 8 years of my life and the kindergarten. The rest of the neighbourhood where I grew up is continually under attack and a huge number of high rises is being torn down. This goes so far that I don’t even recognise certain streets anymore, because most of the buildings are missing. Admittedly it is not a huge loss, since the neighbourhood consists primarily of socialist concrete blocks. It always was quite depressing and ugly. However, at the same time I feel like my childhood memories are slipping away from me and are joining the neighbourhood as it is turning to dust and rubble.

An exploration of the erased spaces of my childhood with the Zorki 4K and some Kentmere 400 film developed in Rodinal. You can find the whole project in the projects section. I am currently printing the pictures in the darkroom to prepare them for publication as a book.

Radioactivity

Although the name already gives a hint as to what it’s all about I won’t tell you anything else about it for now, because the project is still in its planning stage. It will be a long term project and involve three countries, my Mamiya C220 and probably some Fuji Pro 400H film.

 

Finished projects

escape velocity

Efficiency, punctuality and an excessive need for rules are stereotypical characteristics of German identity. On the lookout for expressions of this “Germanness” I ventured to a small suburban town in the immediate vicinity of one of the centres of German carnival culture. What I found were unexpected resonances, surreal juxtapositions and a varied collection of strange behaviours which I present here in a combination of street photography and urban landscape. In this exploration the bleak boredom of suburban life meets one of its major escape mechanisms – a yearly excess of masquerade and alcohol that provides relief from the straightjacket of a culture obsessed with order and discipline. You can find pictures from this project in the projects section.

the delightful weirdness of being

Time and again odd and otherworldly scenes unfold in front of my camera. This project focused on those scenes and attempted to nourish the alien anthropologist in myself who finds human behaviour sometimes a little strange. The project was mainly driven by random chance and my catalog of such pictures kept growing as long as I used a digital camera with high ISO and autofocus. In the end the project ended, because I abandoned its main tool – nowadays I use analog cameras with manual focus and the look of my images changed. Of course human behaviour still remains strange and those weird moments keep happening around me, but for the sake of visual coherence my analog explorations of weirdness deserve a new name (which still eludes me for now). You can find some of the pictures from this project in my projects section.

Down Below

This was my longest ongoing project up to date and explored the subterranean world of Berlin and its weird inhabitants. It was a conceptual project that sometimes made me ride the subway for hours, getting off at each station, shooting while I wait for the next train always on the lookout for those special shots. It seemed as if the subway was an endless provider of odd characters and it especially kept me busy when the horrific Berlin winter made shooting street “up there” impossible. The project found a natural end when I moved away from Berlin, but it might find a continuation in other cities in the future. If you’re interested in the pictures, do check the projects section.