If there is one thing I have learned from the first ten months with my gallery, it's the fact that people from Kiel love to see (and buy) pictures of Kiel. Challenge accepted! Here are the first three which I'm printing these days.
Silent Waddling
I rose in the trellis, darling
Darling
The Teleporter
I’ve always found it hard to find interesting subjects or compositions in German cities. To me personally America is still one of the places most inviting to dive into photography. All those fruits and problems of unleashed capitalism and individualism make it tempting for a German small-town guy to explore and get lost. The US offers a good balance between ‘easy’ and ‘interesting’: the culture is western and familiar while most things are a little off in German eyes - which seems to cause a constant tickle in those brain regions that process little weirdnesses.Anyway, back to Germany. Unless this is exactly what you are trying to capture, Germany is too tamed and regulated to show an interesting surface to the brain-tickle-spoiled random walking camera man.It must be the fact that everything is so extremely in order and taken care of. When roaming German streets it becomes visually evident that efficiency, practicality and conformity rules the German mind. That’s all fine, but how do you take stills that tell interesting stories or set a certain mood in such streets?One way could be to deliberately misinterpret the things you see and turn them into something mysterious. Maybe I will try this more often. Is this artistic or a survival strategy? Is it a Burning Man withdrawal symptom, or is spending your evening with a phone booth the next step to insanity? Whatever it is, it can be fun. Fun as long as you manage to deal with the lurking German eyes behind the window curtains that keep hiding every time you look up.