About me
I feel a need to find some kind of beauty amidst the chaos around us. It is an artistic choice, but even more so an inner urge, because finding structure, energy and, hopefully, beauty in our lives is an essential part of the human condition. At least for me.
Through my pictures, I try to get closer to nature and the world, and to find my own balance. I cannot say why some scenes appeal to me and others do not. Certain moods or things simply strike a chord within me. I cannot describe the resulting resonance in words. Perhaps, however, I can with images.
My greatest inspiration lies ‘on my doorstep’: my home, the Middle Rhine Valley. The more familiar a landscape becomes, the more you see. The landscape is never exhausted; it is one’s own perception, the lack of personal means of expression, that limits us.
The true value, the never-ending urge to take photographs, lies not in the end product, in the finished image. It is the process itself that is the reward and motivation for me. An almost childlike sense of wonder at all the beauty and grandeur of nature.
The more you look, the more you see the miracle in the ordinary.
Aldous Huxley
Foto: Jürgen Bode
About my photography
Outdoors. In nature. Nature is the best therapist for coping with the noise of our times and the clamour of one’s own thoughts. After several years of photography, however, I suspect: it doesn’t matter exactly where I look for subjects. What matters is how I look.
Wim Wenders wrote about ‘Perfect Days’:
And then, miraculously, early in the morning, this ray of sunlight appears on the wall in front of him. And the light falls through the small tree outside the window. There is this interplay of leaves and sunlight and shadows in motion, and his gaze falls upon it; he looks closely and begins to weep, because he has never seen anything so beautiful. He probably saw something like this before, but didn’t notice it. Then he realises that this is the answer to his existential crisis: to become someone who notices this beauty.
Of course, I sometimes visit those hotspots too – in Bavaria, Scotland, and so on. But my most important ‘playground’, my inexhaustible source of inspiration, is right on my doorstep: the Middle Rhine. In the forests, the Rhine slopes, the slate quarries, on the banks of this river that has been my home all my life... I’ve been out and about there with my camera for 15 years and have only taken the first steps towards getting to know this landscape. The infinity of creative possibilities begins on my doorstep, so to speak.
I usually rely on the method of strolling; detours not only increase one’s knowledge of the place but also create serendipities. To quote Walter Benjamin (and Montaigne before him): “One only knows a place once one has experienced it in as many dimensions as possible. One must have approached a square from all four cardinal directions to truly grasp it, and indeed have left it in all those directions as well.”
For me, repetition is key here: returning to a place often. Repetition is not only the mother of learning but also of drawing near. It is only through duration that I begin to see.
Appearances
2023 Exhibition “on the doorstep” in St. Goarshausen, private
2024 Book “Ansitz”
2025 Exhibition “Middlerhine” at Bookshop LESBAR in Weilheim, Obb.
2026 Exhibition “Devon - Speaking stones” at RHEIN-MUSEUM in Koblenz