Picture Series

Chance is present in every photograph, even if it appears in visible detail only retroactively. I have always experienced situations as especially striking – both in commissioned work and in freelance projects – when a place engenders a charged relationship between the (supposedly) given and my own imagination of it, whether it is contexts that are quite limiting and hard to control or the surprise of determining that my own imagination and the “given” have little correlation. This negotiation process of my own perception and the possibilities of chance are especially interesting to me, for they constantly challenge the fragile concept of my own authorship.

The topics I want to work on photographically generally arise from the theoretical examination of “photography” on the one hand and, as in this series, economy on the other. The topic of flexibilisation and alienation in capitalist societies has been driving me for some time. In that way, there was no initial spark. Rather, it was a process of searching for possibilities for a (photographic) criticism of the constraints and effects that are not found outside the living reality of potential viewers, but touch them directly, so they don’t offer any spectacular or contemplative “other”.

I think we can only speculate about the financial aspects of future visual journalism. However, current developments do have the potential to create new platforms, and with them maybe more mutually supportive, less competition-driven concepts, which is something worth striving for. But it is clear to me that a visual journalism of the future must – and it is increasingly happening – devote itself more to examining the politics and practices of representation, as well as the meanings and (im-)materialities that are altered with digital picture strategies.