About

I first saw my world from a wicker laundry basket, where I sat as a small child on my father's worktable. All around me, an almost inextricable jumble of cardboard, paper and glue, leather, wood and glass, of tools, half-finished things and old pictures – a small, inexhaustible disorder of matter in which everything already was something and could, at the same time, become something else.

Perhaps this is one reason why, from the very beginning, something other than what images depicted held my attention. I could be standing in a landscape or before a painting, sometimes merely in front of an ordinary object, and suddenly something would be present that could not be named. Nothing had been added, and yet everything had changed.

That experience has remained with me, though I have never fathomed it. Sometimes a fleeting glance is enough; sometimes it takes years of returning to the same place, observing things in changing light, forgetting them again and eventually finding myself standing before them once more. Their forms do not become less distinct in the process – quite the contrary. The more closely I look, the less what I see seems to be exhausted by what I know of it. It is a strange simultaneity of utmost clarity and a withdrawal that resists every further approach.

In my photographic work, I can move towards this experience, but I cannot bring it about at will. I seek out places, observe the light, alter the conditions or simply wait. Sometimes the work leads me through long series of almost identical attempts, through errors and chance discoveries, and often all that remains is an intimation of what might have been possible. I have learned that even the greatest precision offers no guarantee that an image will appear. Nor can this appearance be attributed to chance alone.

And then, at times, something happens for which every preparation may have been necessary, yet which was contained in none of them. Things remain where they are. But for a moment, the familiar distance between us no longer holds. I see them with a clarity that seeks to hold on to nothing, and find myself caught up in that seeing.

Perhaps an image begins there. Perhaps only much later, when I encounter it again and discover that something has remained present within it which I neither brought into being nor foresaw. It stands before me, perfectly still, and yet with it something has entered the world whose future course I cannot know.