Description

This book is – first and foremost – aimed at everyone who loves (analogue) photography and can relate to the ways of learning the craft by themselves. But it is also aimed at people who know the feeling of being lost in this world, which too often feels like it is impossible for creative personalities to fully and freely develop themselves. The book deals with these topics in such a way as that it shows certain connections between things: The feeling of being lost and the identification with everything separating, the inability to develop as a creative person and the predisposition for addiction problems and mental illnesses. I tell this through the book itself, through the texts but also through my personal story. I started taking photos as a method to keep me distracted when I battled a drug induced psychosis. Taking photos and waiting for the films to be developed became an obsession which got me through the worst of it. Later, when taking photos of everything was an inseparable part of my life, I documented the depths of my depression. Today, I still struggle at times, but I don’t take these kinds of pictures anymore.

Regarding the creative process, I did this all by myself. If you ever made a work of art, you know that there are what could be seen as sets of rules that emerge from the individual artwork: They are like the rules of a game that only show themselves to you when you play it. On this book I worked for so long until every question on every aspect that emerged was answered by me in such a way, that I could not come up with a better solution for it, until I really played it through, so to speak. And there were many of these aspects as there were over 10.000 analogue photographs from a time span of over 7 years, and later a book with over 500 fully designed pages – no filler. From the selection of photographs, the sequencing, the pacing, the telling of the story, the chapters, the page-spreads, the individual pages, the layout, the color correction, the texts, the fonts, the meaning and the message, the format, the paper quality and weight, the print quality, the cover: I worked on this for so long until I could not come up with better answers for anything. Absolutely no compromises were made regarding the artistic qualities, It is 100% the thing I imagined ideally. I would not have wanted it to be published by a publishing house just because in the first place I thought it’d hurt the cover or the book-spine design-wise. That’s how precious this work is to me.

 

Bookstore Availability

For me it’s best if you order a copy here through my website. Still, if you want your copy immediately and live in one of the following citites, or if you want a signed copy (they are exclusively available through book stores) please pay a visit to one of the following stores (and give them my best regards 🙂

New York, USA 

Printed Matter (231 11th Ave, New York, NY 10001, USA)

Berlin, Germany:

C/O Berlin, Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22-24, 10623 Berlin

Bildband Berlin, Immanuelkirchstraße 33, 10405 Berlin

Kominek Gallery, Immanuelkirchstrasse 25, 10405 Berlin

Zadig Bookstore, Gipsstraße 12, 10119 Berlin

London, England Stores: 

The Photographers Gallery Bookshop, 16-18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW, United Kingdom

Rome, Italy:

Leporello Books, Via del Pigneto, 162/e, 00176 Roma RM

Mannheim, Germany:

Kunsthalle Mannheim, Buchshop, Friedrichsplatz 4, 68165 Mannheim

Port25, Hafenstr. 25, 68159 Mannheim

Online Stores:

Artbooksonline.eu

slanted.de