1988 - 2001
REFLECT I.T., selected self portraits made in analogue photo-technique between 1988-2001, book project
"Can a photograph carry the feeling and memory of an exact situation? What gives you the impulse to take a picture? For whom do you perform? How will you look at the pictures from a temporal distance? What does it mean for other people? Can one recognize a life pattern in mere pictures? Can they help to understand yourself?
For years and years I just kept on photographing as I started looking at the world through a lens in Folkwang School.
After taking the developed films from the lab, I spend a gorgious time putting the small prints into groups and forming hierarchies and layouts, daydreaming of exhibition walls that would be like a page in a book. As a heritage of student times in Essen I was familiar with the work of Nan Goldin, but only much later I heard about Wolfgang Tillmans. Things were in the air, in music in free life.
I did not only take pictures of myself, but somehow I kept on returning to this very private motive. It was a secret dialogue I kept to myself. (Important side notice: when you are directing a photo lens of an analogous camera on a stretched arm to yourself you never see anything nor know which kind of details will be on the film.)
Finally in those days there was always work or life waiting to be done and I sealed all the contact sheets, prints and negatives into boxes with the feeling that this archive might become interesting at some point in my life. With the rising of the digital camera technique I stopped this dialogue and, funny enough, those pictures today, about 25 years later, look like common selfies made with a smartphone. Something everybody does at any time, rather normal behaviour, no secret, nothing to hide."
