detour.

This is a series of photographs taken in Paris between Dec. 2017 and April 2018. While I wrote this first line, yet another ten thousand pictures of the city have been taken. Perceiving (my) mass production of imagery as a mounting pressure, was, I believe, the main reason why I started leaning towards film photography. 'Mounting' is a good metaphor to describe an effect created by sheer number or mass – the English noun 'amount' has not shed its surplus of figurative potential. Mountains are challenging. For many thousands of years people saw no good reason to climb them. A mountain of pictures soon becomes a jungle, inaccessible, impossible to cultivate because its rate of growth over manifold the capability to cultivate. What a strange phenomenon to get overwhelmed by material oneself produces. The natural metaphors, however do also hint at hope: we managed to cultivate ground, we raised structures and created gardens. Some become a little more complex such as 'the city'. This man-made environment should be under our control. The early phantasma of the flaneur is perhaps closest to the aristocratic indulgence and delight of the garden. With Rousseau and Poe, the flaneur becomes a hunter of species, a botanist full of curiosity and hustle, driven by an epistemological rigor that fuels modernity - even today that we claim we have left that period behind us. What does this mean for mean for me? The city is a jungle, my images of the city are a jungle too, a hostile nature, waiting for me to turn it into a garden. I will only be able to live within it without fear when the undefined, proliferating mass becomes an archive, edited, navigable, lucid. It seems curiosity and drive have turned on us. We are haunted by the tasks, not only overwhelmed by our personal archives but already by processing impressions to actual experience we can call our own. I lived in the United States for the most part of the past 10 years. Six years of which I spent in Baltimore City and a much shorter time in Standing Rock, ND. My work in Paris still echoes a lot of these years and places. The images I have and take of Paris are part of the work on this archive, while mounting up new piles that will be subject of my future projects. In August 2017, I returned to Europe with a heightened sensitivity for signs of violence in (public) space, I returned to the cities - Berlin and since eight months: Paris. Since then, I am trying to find out who is living here and how. I find my own privileged position restrained by another ten thousand – not images but - surveillance cameras, and the omnipresence of military and police-force. I do not wish to be a part of this gazing violence but instead want to gain distance from the tradition of examining the world realistically. I believe in the latter sense there is nothing 'to show' or to document in this city. I am not eager to identify the subjects motivation in order to determine whether this motivation renders it valid or invalid for the public space that is the street. Neither am I out to find the tolerable curiosity. My streets are very empty. My curiosity is rather aimless. One might say, there is a leftover of the romantic notion of taking a detour. I am looking for otherwise inconspicuous structures and details, traces of violence and restrictions do find a specific pleasure in choosing a form that causes a higher degree of disorientation. I am apparently also looking for signs of freedom. What I do not want to produce are yet other signs, or even allegories. If anything they are landscapes in the best and simple sense that they depict a specific relationship of world and subject. I framed them, I edited them. I have specific interests concerning light, shadow, color, particles, vanishing lines. I have been and still am searching for reds, shifting colors, burning whites.I experimented with the development process of my negatives. The 'alternative process' I have been using for with all of the submitted images (with the exception of 'geo-graphie I') allows me to play with scattered speckles of silvery or bright white and to tilt the appearance of shadows and bright lights. I scan my negatives and yet again, the single image comes into focus. I was the motivating force behind this product. This roll of film is man-made, not any man I am personally responsible. Yet, all frames are to a different degree, will initially be alien to me. Some I will keep because I recognize my motivation in them. The similarities are distinct enough to allow me to think of an identity between the frame and the product I had in mind when I took the image. Others I will keep because I find new reason to do so and that reason was not in the frame at all when the shutter made 'klick'. I am taking the freedom to create an atmosphere. I want more freedom when I look at things. I don't want them to look back at me, their algorithms judging my appearance. I don't live in the landscapes the surveillance cameras produce. I don't want to live in the images of the police and I don't claim to live in those the tourists have of me. But furiously, I cling to the possibility to live in these, in 'my' images. I cultivate a world from them. My streets are very empty. There are no types, only fictional characters, including the one who pressed the shutter. His degree if freedom is ridiculous. It must speak to someone else, bespeak the experience of others, I hope. That's something I have to say.