About (engl.)

I shoot photographs from the gut – the head then plays the constitutive role in the second step of collecting, organizing, grouping and categorizing the collected views of the world.

I pursue an open production aesthetic in my artistic design practice: I am not interested in a planned stylization of myself and my work as a corporate identity strategy of the contemporary artist, be it in formal or thematic specializations – even at the risk of appearing inconsistent, amateurish and unfocused. “Style” interests me as a phenomenon of pigeonholing – not as a pigeonhole itself, within which art should be consistently produced according to the “rules” of art. I try to change the “drawers” as often as possible – it is a methodical game of drawers.

Conceptual work does not exclude this approach within the overall work: but it only comes in a second step, when ideas arise from pictures that have already been shot. Through this “headless photography”, mistakes are provoked from the outset in a deliberately open manner. In general, I also consider mistakes to be the most interesting sources of artistic creation.

This artistic (dis)method is continued in my obsession with collecting: this is the second – usually more labor-intensive – part of my artistic work: placing the collected photographs in different drawers, inventing drawers, taking the groups of pictures apart again and reuniting them in a new and different way.

As a photographer, I am more of a collector than a hunter. I am interested in both the passionate “decisive moment” and the banal “documentation of visible life” as well as staged photography – but these differentiating elements of photographic perception interest me as a pictorial investigation of pigeonholing phenomena (image classification systems within contextualization norms), not as pigeonholes themselves.

Decisions regarding the selection of images – formal-aesthetic characteristics of the images with regard to an intended categorization – I make again with my gut, not with my head, as in photography. Photographs can thus be found and rediscovered by me in retrospect.