Ansitz

Nature is constantly changing. Not only due to the seasons but also to species pressure, extinction, erosion, evolution, climate change and pressure on species as well as loss of them. The real constant is nature's uninterrupted process of adaptation. Man - even if they often deny it - are part of nature. We are hunters. However, we rarely strive for a balance in nature, as we do in hunting. Conservation and hunting are an attempt to restore a balance in nature that humans have brought into imbalance in the first place. Hunting, and thus the high seats, also show that we are part of nature and its cycles - even if we often forget this.

Naturally, the decision to make raised hides the subject of a project involved taking a closer look at them: construction, location, durability, material, foundations, forms began to interest the homo technicus in their wealth of variants. As homo aestheticus, on the other hand, I began to perceive geometric, creative qualities and to adopt different perspectives on each structure.

Minor White, advised all students to photograph things for their own sake and (!) what they also represented. As an analogy, as an association, as an equivalence, as a metaphor.

As a landscape photographer, you want above all else to capture the beauty of nature in the interplay of light and shadow. I perceive man-made objects as predominantly disturbing, if not detrimental, to the effect of the image.
This photographic project was initially motivated by the fact that I tended to perceive high seats in landscape photographs as inappropiate elements. However, as they are inevitably to be found almost everywhere in my home country, intruding so to speak, into many pictures, the idea arose to integrate them into the pictures, to make them part of the picture composition, to the subject of this anthology.

This work is the result of a process of adaptation in the course of which the division between landscape photography and architectural photography became obsolete.

All but a handful of the photos were taken within a radius of around 10 kilometres of my home. I ended up with over 250 images, about 100 were collected in a little book.

I imagine the high seat as a place, the hide as a time when idleness, contemplation, joy in the vitality of everything natural meet with the decision about life and death. The most lonely and irrevocable decision in our relationship with another being, which is as much a part of the world as we are, is to kill it. A necessity in the sense of preserving and maintaining a balance. It is difficult to imagine a more archaic act.

The final act of decision and killing takes place when the hunter and the hunted are in the same place at the same time. The space and the simultaneous existence connects both. The shot has a reverberation time: the duration for which the pressure wave is still audible after the shot has been fired. How long is the reverberation time of this irreversible decision and the act carried out on a living being in the hunter himself?