Sometimes I forget how foolish people can be. Not in terms of intellectual inferiority, but in their spectacular ability to ignore the most obvious connections.
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Recently, I stood in the Museum of Modern Art in front of a photograph by Thomas Demand. Office chairs, desks, papers — about as exciting as waiting at the registry office, I thought at first. My gaze was already wandering to the door and the promising museum shop beyond, when I read the description more out of a sense of duty than interest. And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning.
The other day, while reviewing my behind-the-scenes videos for Patreon, I noticed something that's been on my mind ever since. For the first time, I really saw myself at work. Not just the results, but me, actually photographing. And honestly, I was a bit shocked.
I prefer working with natural light. Always. Everywhere. It's my religion. But the weather? The weather is an atheist and couldn't care less about my faith.
Fuerteventura Airport. Among tired tourists and families with whining children, there she stands — freshly flown in from Barcelona, the new face for my island series. Tall, confident, with that look that instantly signals camera readiness. After the obligatory small talk during the drive, we move on to what's probably the most boring part for her, but the most revealing for me: our joint shopping trip.
It was a liberating feeling, I have to say. Deleted X and Facebook from my phone. Just gone. Those constant distractions that feel like a nervous tic you picked up somewhere along the way.
Do you still remember that feeling? Stumbling out of the cinema as a child, somehow dazed and intoxicated, with a head full of magical images and the unmistakable feeling of having just been in another world? I can still vividly recall how trips to the cinema in my childhood literally put me in a trance-like state. After the film, I always needed some time to return to reality.
Three years and seven months. That's how long it had been since my last portrait. I didn't count that myself; my photo software told me when I went looking for the image. And yes, I actually had to look.
I'd barely gotten back from Tenerife when the doorbell rang. And then again, immediately. The DHL driver was clearly not the patient type. Neither am I, to be fair, but I'd just survived a long-haul flight.
Every few months, there's this moment when I restock my art shop. I sit in front of my archive, scrolling through thousands of images, and it hits me again: a good photograph isn't automatically a good wall print.
A fascinating headline that hasn't let me go since I read about the Beatles. Imagine: a single day in the studio and the entire first album is completed. Pure intuition, pure feeling — and a result that made music history.
It's just past midnight and I'm sitting in bed with my MacBook. Sounds like one of those moments where you catch yourself thinking, doesn't it? The thing is, I'm not really the type for late-night brooding. But sometimes, it just has to come out. This vague feeling that the world is slipping through my fingers. As if someone set the playback speed to 1.5x while I'm still trying to keep up at normal speed.
International editions of Vogue and Elle were piled on my desk. For hours, I studied the photo spreads, searching for the secret of their fascination. What makes these photos so magnetic, so irresistibly alive?
Sometimes you buy a watch because it looks like a James Bond gadget from the eighties. Black plastic, lots of tiny buttons, mysterious symbols on the display — and then that one function that makes you giggle like a twelve-year-old: tide prediction. After a trip to El Cotillo, I know: It's about two hours off, but for a rough overview, it's perfectly fine.
Digital communication certainly has its pitfalls. This morning I received a message from a well-known model — if you can even call it a message. A single emoji, that little figure with a raised arm, like an eager student just before the bell rings for break. The digital gesture was probably meant to say: "Hey, I want to go to Ibiza too!"
As a kid, I had those "Where's Waldo?" style illustration books. I could disappear into them for hours, hunting for details, inventing stories between the drawn figures. Maybe I should have loved AI composites. But I don't.
As a photographer, I dream of large images. Of photos that can breathe. But then the layout department chimes in, and suddenly my photographic masterpiece must be forced into a corset that doesn't match its natural form at all.
Recently my wife repeated that sentence she likes to say often: "Find yourself a hobby." I had to smile, because how do you explain to someone that it's not so simple when you've turned your hobby into your profession? Photography isn't just my job, it's my passion, my constant companion, essentially my second wife — though perhaps I shouldn't phrase it quite like that.
Here we go again. A new year has begun, and here I sit with my coffee, scrolling through my calendar. A few shoots are already scheduled. February: Tenerife. May: possibly Paris. But in between? Gaps. Large, white gaps waiting to be filled.
Sometimes I have to look twice when I realize how working with models has changed in recent years. Not because of new camera technology or sophisticated lighting, but because of something much more fundamental: the way the younger generation lives relationships and earns money with them.
Sometimes the strangest things happen when you're just sitting there, staring into space. Like yesterday, when I was slouching in my living room, looking at this picture on the wall. Not particularly attentively, more like the way you look at things that have been hanging there forever. And suddenly this thought hit me like a small electric shock: Is this actually really mine?
Today I'm getting personal. I rarely share such stories, but this particular photoshoot deserves an exception. It's about Julene, the woman with the "Fighter" tattoo on her hip bone.
For days, I've been preoccupied with a message. "The contrasts are wrong," someone writes to me. Just like that. Four words that have me pondering. Not because I doubt my work, but because they say so much about our understanding of art.
It's Petra's birthday. I have a beautiful photo of her, taken just a few weeks ago during our shoot in Fuerteventura. She's wearing lingerie, kneeling on a sofa, looking toward the window. No nipple, no provocative pose, nothing you wouldn't see in any perfume shop display or at any train station newsstand. So I post the image on Instagram with the caption "Happy Birthday" and think nothing of it.
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