11-21
The Photographer’s Office / 2007 (bilingual: English & German)

When I had my first passport photo taken at the age of eleven, I didn’t know that it would be the first in a whole series. And years later, when I had amassed quite a collection of passport photos, I didn’t know what to do with them. Only when I was studying photography in England did I have an idea of what to do with these images. My tutors advised me against starting a project based around them, however, because they didn’t think enough time had elapsed since they were created and that I wouldn’t have acquired enough emotional distance. Many years have gone by since the last images were created in 1998.

The result is really my biography but it is not the real reason for this book. Far more than the need to see my own life story written down, it was important for me to explore the impact of a series of unspectacular images, which is what passport photos are, and where this process can lead. In this sense my youth, adventurous, playful and confused as it was, actually had rather a positive outcome and is representative of many other life stories, which could have been investigated. Nor am I alone in using photo booths and exploring their possibilities beyond bureaucratic purposes, it’s just that I have done so to a more excessive and rigorous degree than most. And I never gave up on the thought that these images would one day speak to me and tell me their story. With this very personal book, in which I give information about myself with an openness I have never displayed before and perhaps never will again, the experiment has finished nearly 20 years after it began.

Edition size: 500