Photobooks

Just after I had finished high-school I started travelling, first all-around Turkey, then, a couple of years later, to India, Nepal, Thailand, Hongkong, Taiwan, China and Bangladesh. I had very little money and travelled on a shoestring, film weas expensive, and since in the beginning I was more interested in writing and art (Beuys’ “Everyone is an artist”!!)  than photography, I took photos more sporadically – and occasionally quite randomly. (I still have a friend in Ladakh who remembers me taking images of non-descript stones or odd corners – and doesn’t hesitate to remind me and others that he always wondered what those pictures were all about. Sadly. I couldn’t tell him now and I am not even sure I could have told him then. I reckon though that at that time I must have found them important enough to spent precious frames on them. Unluckily, I thus missed out on taking photos of lots of (more interesting, relevant, nice) things that I remember much better but have no record of now.

After my want-to-be-an-artist friend Stephan  (Beuys again!), who came out to Bangladesh to meet up with me  after two years of more-or-less non-stop (albeit very slow) postcard, letter and letter-book conversation (yes, some times we wrote the letters over an extended period of time and sent the filled notebook off) had decided that my valuable (to me) manuscript of a novel in the making was no good at all and useful only as toilet paper (which was a rather rare commodity in Bangladesh then), I got more and more into photography. Since I had somewhat anticipated my friend’s verdict (and anyways understood that I needed a more promising way to eventually make some money) I had bought camera gear in Hongkong to replace my Minox 35 ML and decided to play ‘photographer’ from now on instead of ‘writer’. And was it not true that an image told more than you could say in a thousand words? Much easier than writing a novel and getting entangled in my own problems and shortcomings. Especially since there was so much to see and document that I felt I just couldn’t keep up with words, more so since I got more and more enthralled by the sheer density of detail in South-Asia. Of course, I had not only bought a couple of Nikon bodies (F3HP and FM2) plus some lenses, filters and a flash, but had also stocked up on professional slide and B/W film that would be so much better than the slide film made by ORWO (then still Eastern Germany, GDR) which I had till then used mainly because it was the cheapest available at 5 DM (German Marks) including development.

When I returned to Germany after more or less three years of traveling and living in South and East Asia, I started working as an assistant  in a photo studio helping produce product shots of ice cream, cheese, table ware, dentist chairs, electronic parts etc., mainly because I felt I would learn most about the technical and professional side of photography in a studio where light was not so much found but ‘made’. But my heart and sight were on travel reportage which I tried (unsuccessfully) until my first child was born and it became unfeasible to be away on location so much. Also, at that time advertising (and thus job opportunities) was down considerably and I ended up getting a degree in psychology. Photography went back to taking family and vacation snapshots, the dark-room was packed away and instead of the Nikons I started using small point-and-shoot cameras again. Travel didn’t stop, though, and eventually I started on culture-psychological projects (akin to ethnography, albeit with a more psychological and individuum-centered focus) which necessitated documenting all the stuff I found interesting and allowed me to get back into taking photos with a purpose beyond family life. Since my projects involved travel and research in India, everything started to fall in place again.

For reasons of economy and versatility I switched to digital cameras and clicked away, but it took a few years till I ditched academic research and focused more on the photographic than the theoretical and abstract side of what I observed. Only then did I start shooting with professional DSLRs and in RAW and learned how to post-process my digital files – reminding me of the time when I had stopped using my Minox and ORWO films and started using the Nikons and Fujichrome Professional D, Ilford FP4, HP5 etc. and developing my B/W films and printing images in my own darkroom.

As everything on this website, the photobook section is work in progress – even the photobooks themselves are work in progress. I present them here as flipbooks which I might update as they evolve, get re-edited, text added or changed. The main purpose of the photobooks is to create and preserve my earlier and more recent travels in a more digestible form than folders full of (more or rather less edited and curated) images. As the travels recede more and more into the/my past and as the world changes the images more an more show a world that is past, things that are gone, memories and stories that change unless made more tangible and put into ( a certain) context.

I hope to make books about all my (significant to me) journeys as well as books focusing on themes (or moods or whatever) that are important to me.

I thus make these books for myself, and my children, and for everyone else who might find them interesting.

The flipbooks are best viewed on a larger monitor in full screen mode. They are not printable and not for download. In case you are interested in a printed version, please contact me.

To activate full-screen-mode click on the circled icon in the respective flipbook’s toolbar: