Dreams of a Distant Place

As a boy growing up in the '70s-'80s behind the iron curtain of the cold war - East Berlin - I would daydream of all the far away and mysterious places people of the Eastern (communist) bloc were not allowed to visit. The longing for discovery was manifested in long hours and days spent with my postcard, coin and record collections from all corners of the globe, or reading books with stories about places I wished to be able to see with my own eyes. This body of work is an attempt to reconstruct the visuals of my childhood dreams when my mind started wandering, driven by a politically suppressed Wanderlust. Today I am living in a far away place from home. I live and work in South East Asia since more than 15 years now. Certainly my curiosity for distant places and the willingness to explore to an extent of leaving home and actually live in those places has it’s roots in those childhood years. All taken photographs for this series are of foreign looking sceneries or objects but are missing a factual definition of place and time since these are a boy’s imaginations of places he has never been to. The chosen dream sequences are different by tonality and subject due to the erratic nature of those dreams or daydreams yet the format of triptychs on instant film holds them together as a unified body of work. While each triptych stands by itself as a dream sequence many of them have two "siblings" so that they can be presented as ninetychs representing a more complex dream with relating visuals. All pictures have been printed on instant film and scanned with a high-res drum scanner. The chemical residue, the uneven frame and surface cracks of the instant film support the concept of creating dream-like scenarios. The enlargement of the rather small original instant film through bigger prints emphasizes on those effects. In November 2014 the fall of the Berlin Wall will have its 25th anniversary. This series is an ongoing project that will grow with me through my lifetime. The number of photographed pieces is currently at about 90 triptychs.