ENTRY DESCRIPTION
About the series “Dreams of a Distant Place”

As a boy growing up in the '70s-'80s behind the iron curtain of the cold war - East Berlin - I would
daydream of all the far away and mysterious places people of the Eastern (communist) bloc were not
allowed to visit. The longing for discovery was manifested in long hours and days spent with my postcard
and coin collections from all corners of the globe, or reading books with stories about places I wished to be
able to see with my own eyes.
This body of work is an attempt to reconstruct the visuals of my childhood dreams when my mind started
wandering, driven by a politically suppressed Wanderlust.
Today I am living in a far away place from home.
I live and work in South East Asia since more than 15 years now.
Certainly my curiosity for distant places and the willingness to explore to an extent of leaving home and
actually live in those places has it’s roots in those childhood years.
All taken photographs for this series are of foreign looking sceneries or objects but are missing a factual
definition of place and time since these are a boy’s imaginations of places he has never been to.
The chosen dream sequences deliberately vary widely in tonality and subject in order to express the erratic
nature of adolescent boyhood dreams in a suppressed environment yet the format of triptychs on instant
film holds them together as a unified body of work.
While each triptych stands by itself as a dream sequence many of them have two "siblings" so that they can
be presented as ninetychs representing a more complex dream with relating visuals.

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