[b. 1964] German sculptor and photographer
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[Once the photograph is taken], the sculpture is no longer that important, but nor is the photograph.... I have never thought in terms of my work culminating in pure photography.
It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t make photographs.
..the chances of making it as an artist are so small, I’d advise anyone to do something they are really passionate about, rather than speculating about what other people might be interested in. That way, if you don’t make it, which is quite likely, you at least know you were working on something that meant something to you.
[With my photographs] you have a [single, forever fixed] moment and my particular angle of vision. My tyrannical condition, as it were, is that I prescribe your vision.
..if I’m invited to do a photography show, I tend to say no. The medium itself, I find, is a relatively boring context. You would never see a show about acrylic paint.
The production of models is at the core of a complex process.... The surroundings I portray are for me something untouched, a utopic construction. No traces are visible on their surfaces, and time seems to have come to a stop. From this arises a paradoxical state of indeterminacy, which of course in one sense opposes the idea of momentariness (so important to the beginnings of photography) but also opposes the true nature of sculpture.
All I can show you are the things necessary to demonstrate the thought that led me to this picture. I can’t show you the actual thought. Otherwise I’d write a pamphlet and put it up on the wall.
Working with existing pictures, like I do, you constantly think about the flood of images we are subjected to and you want to figure out how you can make sense of it.
An image is always only showing what’s necessary for a thought, not the thought itself.
I’m self-taught in photography, but it’s easy. People make a bigger deal of it than it actually is.
I think that nowadays there are more images in the world than world to be in the pictures.
[Cameras] start to interpret life to us, which is a tautological circle, and I wonder how long you can feed yourself with yourself.
My work is in itself a ghost of my vision.
Artists work the with the material given by the media as much as with real experience because that material is superimposed on reality and configures the tools we use to make our way through the world.
I have the impression that photography can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead.
What is decisive are the blurred traces left in the media by [the] incidents [they relay].
Things just enter reality through photographs.
