Born 1972 in Reinbek, a suburb of Hamburg, Germany. Living and working in Hamburg.
My father was an avid hobby photographer and I fondly remember the afternoons spent developing pictures. I got my first camera when I was seven, later taking over his faithful Minolta SRT-101. I have switched more or less completely to digital by now, but I am still using the old Rokkor lenses.
I was always fascinated by the overlooked details. I used to get lost – and sometimes still do – in the microcosms of puddles, grains of sand or the patterns formed by random occurences. I could sit still for hours and read the woodchip wallpaper.
In a world which remained by and large a mystery to me, photography is a means of trying and failing to make sense of it all, to triangulate my position within or without the world and society. Always trying to explore, analyse, and ideally understand the interplay between these two entities, between nature and culture.
The absurd manifests itself – or makes itself felt – in the details. Not in the obviously grotesque. Looking for clues in the arbitrary, the random. Things that are there to be seen only reveal what they are intended to reveal. Things that just happen to be there are usually worth a second look. Same goes for people, most of the time.
Particularly in a world where anybody is able to produce – for better or for worse – technically perfect images, I prefer to embrace imperfection. To remember that so many thoughts worth having are born of doubt and failure, of trying to achieve something which is just out of reach.