Gesichter/Faces

»I grew up in an art-conscious parental home. My grandfather was a sought-after landscape artist of the Düsseldorf School. As a result, there were beautiful paintings everywhere in the house, including two large portraits of my great-grandparents from the beginning of the nineteenth century, which made a lasting impression on me as a boy. So it’s not surprising that, as a high-school graduate, I photographed with my first 35 mm camera on the first film a face, my own, a selfportrait. That was in 1954. After that, photography didn’t let me go. So, in the sixty-four years until this day, I have recorded, among my other topics, over four hundred human faces, above all those of family members and friends. I had studied geology and had become a geologist, which meant making endless journeys all over the world and also inevitably making countless human contacts. So I could also photograph human faces over and over again in all the visited countries. As a geologist, I usually only met people living in the countryside such as farmers, shepherds, fishermen or innkeepers, but hardly a city dweller. With the help of the camera, I have tried to capture the many expressive possibilities of the human face, understanding that every face is unmistakable. I have experimented with various camera models and film types of analogue photography, but I said goodbye to them in 2014 in order to get to know and to use the almost inexhaustible possibilities of digital photography, most recently using a monochrome Leica. I have, however, remained as faithful as possible to one classical tool of photography: the tripod.«