Why did I become a photographer early in life? First of all it was fun to take pictures and get good grades at school for all the fun. In the late sixties everyone wanted to become famous as a rock star, film maker or photographer, in that order. And it was the high time of pop art, auteur cinema, photo journalism and magazine photography - all fields I was very interested in.
At sixteen years of age I became involved in a group of light show artists, who called themselves 'Light Show Group Q4' and organized parties we called "happenings" and later played with all forms of media and light at rock concerts. While we experimented with color in the lab our heroes were David Hamilton, Charles Wilp and Andy Warhol and films like Antonioni's 'Blow Up' and Andrzej Zulawski's 'L'Important c'est d'aimer' ('Nachtblende' with Romy Schneider), with photographers as protagonists, were role models.
My work became much more focused in the early seventies, when I discovered the possibilities of the Rolleicord - my parents 6x6 mid format camera from 1954 - and learned to compose the pictures in the viewer, because at the same time I began taking color slides. It was easy to think of a life as an artist and intellectual bohemian in those years. My parents influenced me in the sense, that there were great pieces of art on the walls and the house was always full of interesting visitors.
Of course there also were the mind altering drugs of those years. I experimented with LSD and cannabis mostly - after a few years of mainly recreational use I started learning to use the camera after smoking a good joint. This took some time and quite a few typical errors happened, like trying to take pictures without any film in the camera and similar symptoms of idiocy. But once it was more or less mastered, I could more often use my expanded perception in order to compose better pictures - in the camera viewer or the dark room.
Now I could earn a little money with my pictures: a small job at the 'Szene Hamburg', the local city paper (copied from London's Time Out) lead to some journalistic work and my devotion to live rock music and the shooting of photos at concerts - then still without restrictions even of the press - made me become the set card photographer for a major music publisher. Now the Deutschmarks started pouring in, well not quite...
role model photographers
the realists: Robert Frank, Robert Doisneau, Andreas Feininger, André Kertéz, Robert Capa, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Joel Meyerowitz
and of course the great Man Ray
curriculum vitae
born a long time ago in Hamburg, Germany....lived and worked as photographer....system administrator....cinema programmer....web designer....bar manager....multimedia producer....teacher....festival organizer....video artist....robot designer....sailor.....
