Remembering
Following an inner voice, I decided at one point in time to photograph people. For weeks I walked through the streets without daring to approach anyone. Only if something in the face of the people or in their habitus touched me, I dared to approach them, asking them for the permission to take a photograph. After the fall of the wall, I began to travel to the territory of the former GDR. All I had with me was a sleeping bag and my camera. I slept at the weirdest places, always got up very early because of the freezing morning cold, and then I went out to document what was and soon would be no more. As usually, my intuitive reactions were stronger than the concept I had in my mind.
My images of people were far stronger than anything else I photographed. Most of the times I took pictures of children. They had time, as I did, and I was a little less shy with them than I was with adults. I looked at my pictures, saw the children´s sad faces, and at some point, later, I understood that I had recognized something of myself in them, from a time in my childhood that had passed, and of which I no longer wanted to know anything about. My photographs, they seem to appear directly from the past into my present, at the crossroad of the country I was born, Germany, and the country my parents came from.
1987-1993