It took me quite a while to finish my new book. At first, I was blocked inside because I had worked so hard on Sublime that I was simply afraid that every subsequent book would just be worse.
And even when I had been working on the new book for two years, I didn't know if I could match the intensity of Sublime. In the meantime, that has changed and it feels good, because my new coffee table book has turned out very, very well. Very varied, without repetition. Not a copy of my previous books, but a new work that is refreshing and fun. It's the best I'm capable of producing at the moment (and fortunately I've gotten better over the years) and it feels good to be able to go public after many thousands of hours of work.
Mellow is my best work yet.
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Working on the new book was difficult at first. The pandemic slowed me down for almost a full two years. All the shoots I had planned for 2020 were canceled. Trips were canceled (and travel bans imposed) and I had to cancel all locations. I couldn't get any of the planned locations for shoots again later.
When I was finally back in Tenerife after 23 months, it was even compulsory to wear a mask outdoors. It was so absurd wearing a mask and sunglasses in public, you couldn't see anything of my face.
But I never gave up and traveled to exciting new places and came up with new themes. I didn't follow the motto "higher, faster, further", but instead went down nostalgic paths and found something special in simplicity.
The average age of the models this time is 28. That means there is also more maturity in it. Women who have already experienced something, have developed a personality, know their bodies and have experience. This also led to the title: Mellow as an emotional state. In a good mood, quietly happy, relaxed and calm.
Of the 27 different women in the book, 12 are from Ukraine. Three each come from the Czech Republic, Italy and Romania. The rest of the models have passports from France, Venezuela, Croatia, Holland, England and Australia. I myself am a little surprised that I wasn't able to find any woman from Germany to appear in my new photo book.
There are certainly great women in my home country, but nudity is something of a problem in this country. If the pictures are to be published anyway. It doesn't matter! Nationality doesn't matter to me at all. They were all great people, each one enchanting in their own right.
In January, I've putting the finishing touches to the print preparation. To be more precise: I sat next to Oliver who I commissioned to set the final documents up and to observe the exact print specifications with bleed, color profiles and so on. This is called final artwork in technical jargon, but I don't know how much technical jargon I should put in my article.
The proof prints followed. An almost color-accurate printout was produced on an expensive Epson printer with a matching color profile so that I could see the nuances of the color tones.
I was satisfied with the results, but needed to make these steps, because there are some dark images in the book and I had to make sure, you can still see details and don't just have a dark page in print. Seeing photos on screen is always different than on paper.
Then I built a 1:1 dummy of the cover envelope. I printed it out in color on an A2 printer and folded it as it will look in the end. Everything always looks different in original size.
Beginning of February, I will have two photo productions for my 2025 calendar. And meanwhile, the printing house is manually preparing a dummy book from printouts which will later help the people in the book bindery to get all pages together in the right order and don't mess up things.
Mid of February, I will order all packaging material. Hundreds of cardboard boxes, labels, protective film and packing tape.
Printing happens next. I will be there the whole time when the new book is being printed — as I was with my two previous books. Printing is always something very special. The machines are fascinating and I'm amazed by all the paper, the large sheets with eight pages seemingly jumbled up on them.
The bookbindery will take a few weeks afterwards. After all, producing a book is a lot of manual work. Someone recently told me that they thought a finished book came off the printing press. Well, unfortunately it's not like that.
I've been working flat out for the last two years, experimenting a lot, throwing a lot away, because my main criterion has always been: do I like what I see? And now, after so much work, everything is perfect. I'm incredibly happy with the result.
And now, of course, I'm really looking forward to seeing what you think of the book! I hope you have already ordered a copy, because the edition is limited to 1,000 copies. The German fixed book price only allows discounts for pre-orders. This means that if you would like to order a copy at a discount of 17 €, you must order now. There will be no discount campaigns later. Simply because it is not permitted by law in Germany.