Why do we do, what we do? What drives us? Where do we wanna go with what we create and share with the world? This is not about a certain style for me, it is more about what i want to tell. So let’s dig a bit into my vision for what i do.

When I started photography almost 15 years ago it became my way to express what i saw and what was important in my life. I never felt so good in words and being a shy kid, photography was a great way to express myself. I saw so many amazing things out there, so many beautiful moments that i wanted to capture them – for me, but also for others to share it with them. What that has to do with my vision?

Photography never was more than a tool for me. A tool that felt natural to me to use. I always felt comfortable with a camera in my hands. It was something what belonged there and felt right. But mainly my motivation was to show what i saw that people could understand it. I never felt as an artist, someone how was creating something new. I was more the one who was recording what i saw and experienced, experimenting with that maybe to some extend. Something what not changed till today.

My vision has nothing to do with a tool or any special form of media i guess. My vision is about expressing something that is so important to me and in my opinion way to often taken for granted. With more or less everything i do i want to create understanding for situations, connect people with what they see and make them feel what the people i show go through or experience. I want to tell stories. And i think that showing just the hard and sad parts of the stories is by far not enough. There is so much beauty in many of the stories and even when it’s about war, poverty or Aids, i feel that there is more to tell. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I like long term or longer term stories, because this projects allow me to dig deep into the story and tell it in a way that goes beyond just one picture of it. I might be emotionally affected by a series of b/w pictures of some refugees in Congo, but do I really understand what it means to live under this circumstances, how they organize themselves or what they have gone through? Aren’t we just seeing what we want to see, when we take this pictures as the one and only reality?

After some time doing all this it became clear to me that what i wanted to do with my work was creating understanding. Understanding for livelihoods, different cultures and situations people live in as i truly believe that in the moment something gets personal and we start to understand what it means, we also hardly can look away so easily. And at the same time I want to do justice to the people I photograph, film or interview. I want people to know that every life has so much beauty and passion and power in it. And every person I met in my life could teach me something, no matter if it was a streetkid in Kenya, a monk in Ladakh or just the guy next door. Maybe that is my motivation for what I do, my vision what i want to achieve with my work and my thoughts how the world could be a better place.

The little piece below is still one of my favorites of what I did. We asked people in Rwanda a bunch of open and easy questions and one of the things I saw in the reactions of people when i was showing it in lectures was that they were surprised how equal wishes, thoughts and needs were to the ones they had. A reaction I was hoping to get. You can find the whole series here.