About me

It all started in 2002. My wife Rachel and I took our first trip to the southwest of the USA. Eleven more would follow to date....

The landscapes of the Colorado Plateau changed me profoundly. As an avid mountaineer, climber and mountain biker, I had cultivated a very deep connection to nature since my youth. But here, everything was different. Nature was no longer primarily a stomping ground for my sporting activities. Rather, I had the impression of witnessing a fantastic spectacle with big children's eyes, in which I was not the center but at best a spectator: canyons, mountain peaks, plateaus, sand dunes, rivers, staging themselves in ever new moods, awakened in me a longing that remains unbroken to this day.

Until then, light had defined itself for me almost exclusively in its opposition to darkness. Light as a central factor of nature's ever new self-dramatization had remained largely hidden from me. And suddenly I sat there in amazement and witnessed how the delicate light of the rising sun allowed shapes and colors to emerge and fade, how the soothing evening light, the golden hour, softened contrasts, modeled this breathtaking landscape and wrapped it in a warm, orange-red, velvety cloak.

Arches Nationalpark

Never before had I been made so aware of how fleeting beauty is, never before had I felt a deeper need to capture this very beauty. Charles Baudelaire, the famous French poet of the 19th century, compares beauty in "À une passante" to a passing stranger. The observer is dazzled by her beauty, falls madly in love; but she passes on, and before he knows it, she is gone forever. Baudelaire has always understood his poetry as an attempt to counter the transience of beauty with something permanent. In my full-time job as a high school teacher, I try to teach my students the French language, to open up the beauty and profundity of literature together with them. Success only comes in the long term. A lot of patience and perseverance are required. Perhaps that is why I am attracted to photography by the aesthetics of the immediate, the moment of fleeting beauty captured in the picture...

In retrospect, the awkward naiveté of my first photographic attempts makes me smile. The graceful beauty of the American Southwest is not a chumming, cheap one that surrenders to the first casual observer. Only those who very patiently and earnestly try to get to the bottom of the mystery of her light come into the favor of her smile. There was this encounter in White Pocket somewhere in the nowhere of the Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness. Miles away from the nearest settlement, this photographer sat behind his tripod. Alone. For hours. Motionless. I asked him how long he'd been there. "A few days," he replied. I wanted to know how many pictures he had already taken. "None," was the reply. I didn't understand how someone could keep his finger off the shutter in the middle of what was probably the most fascinating landscape ever presented to my eyes, defying the digital age. "I'm waiting for the right light," was all he meant....

Back in Springdale in Zion National Park, Rachel and I visited Michael Fatali's exhibit. His pictures left us both speechless: poetry of light that outshines everything... Later I read the books of Ansel Adams and Tom Till and tried to decipher their pictures. Thanks to the photographic guides of Laurent Martrès, we reached places of breathtaking beauty that are not mentioned in any guidebook. Thus, each in his own way has initiated me into the mystery of light. For this I am very grateful to them.