Motives (Causalities/visualities/technicalities)
In retrospect, as an 11 year old, my interest in making photographs mainly lay in two areas: Firstly, exposing some of the forms, objects or places that hit my eye. It felt as if I could load them with a greater significance by giving them a second home in the form of a photograph. Second, on a more psychological level, I had the impression that photography could counterbalance my slight disbelief in reality. The photograph as a physical proof of something I had seen/witnessed/felt. No written diary, I thought, could ever record my findings that quickly and in a form that spoke to me so directly.
For a long time I was just interested in making and owning a photo. It wasn't even about the result and I was unconcerned with composition. I couldn’t have cared less about the often blurry results. As long as the object was more or less visible. Open the shutter, document, memory saved for later, done. Hoarding. It would be many years before the interest in my visual wording began to grow.
I was fascinated by photography's blatant ability to speak about the transience of all things. I figured early on that my object's meaning will change over the course of time. It was thrilling to start a long lasting process of observation for every single photo I made.
Much later, when I started photographing people, I found myself using the camera to hide behind. Like a shield to keep the necessary distance, it barricaded me from being overwhelmed by the impressions I experienced as a young adult. Like a surgeon who needs to be able to disconnect body from person, the camera was my psychological one-trick pony.
What will forever fascinate me is the impossibility of being in total control regarding the outcome of a photograph. The unexpected, unpredictable, coincidental aspect of photography, unforced or forced, is the surprising element of the medium that keeps me hooked to this day. In spite of having gone through an institutional education in my later years, I am an amateur/amador/lover and will forever remain an autodidact.
Curiosity is what makes us (want to) learn and as a father I see that every day. Children are curious by nature, though adults tend to lose it along the way. I held on to the camera because photographs fed my curiosity again and again. It kept me learning and it kept me a l i v e.
My earliest memory is a mind photograph:
In it I see a warm, glowing rectangle on the wall of the darkened living room in my mum’s house. Family photos are rotating in a slide projector. This quirky machine, its humming song accompanied by a warm stream of air. A beam of light holding a cosmos of swirling dust. And its final resting place, the canvas, hung up on a nail for that very purpose and surrounded by brown wallpaper with a pattern of tiny white flowers. The flat images, embedded in a multi-sensory and three-dimensional environment, simply shook me. I later found out that had been three years old.