And then it hits me.
I have an anniversary. Lufthansa is currently celebrating 100 years as an airline. I'm celebrating 20 years as a nude photographer. I'm aware of the difference in scale, thank you very much. But it's still a wild thing to realize.
The beginning was anything but glamorous. I'd bought myself a professional Profoto flash system. Cost a fortune. Then I put up a notice at Goethe University in Frankfurt, looking for a model. A few students actually responded. I did my first shoot with one of them.
My inspiration came from the film "Eyes Wide Shut". There's that one scene in the fur shop, where costume and identity blur into each other. An opaque moment, but it had set my imagination running. So I tracked down a costume rental place in Frankfurt that carried theatrical costumes. The staff were about as welcoming as a tax office on a Monday morning, and I had to wait forever. Still, I walked out with a rented rabbit head. Not a Playboy bunny, mind you. A proper theatrical rabbit head. A massive thing that looked like it belonged at a medieval fair.
The photos were … distinctive. Not exactly flattering, but definitely different. I was never allowed to show them. Right at my very first shoot, the model refused to let me publish anything. I had no contract, of course. No clue. No system. A steep learning curve lay ahead, and it started with a wall.
But then came Marta. She was professional, tall, striking. She knew how to pose, and I could finally focus on my camera instead of having to be everything at once. On July 14, 2006, in a period apartment in Frankfurt that I'd rented for a few hours, the images were made that mark my real beginning. That was the moment I knew: I'm going to keep doing this. Not as a hobby, not as a phase.
It took almost another six years, by the way, before I found my style and got to do my first Playboy production. Six years in which I got a lot wrong, learned a fair amount, and simply endured the rest. Anyone who thinks a path like this is a straight line has never tried building a career in nude photography without an assistant, without a team, and without a safety net.
But I've been active since 2006. Without interruption. Twenty years, one rabbit head, and a considerable number of photographs later, I'm sitting on the sofa again, doing the maths. Only now I know what I'm doing. Most of the time, anyway.
