ENTRY DESCRIPTION
My long term project the silent view is about nature and the human intervention with architecture, industry and infrastructure. To achieve a different view to the world, I use the paper negative process.
In 1988 I found a large format camera from the 1930th in the basement of an old house ready for
demolision. On a flea market I bought a 21 inch lens, which is the normal size for a 30cm x 40cm negative format. It had no shutter but, the aperture range went from 9 to 128. At that time there was no film produced in 30 cm x 40 cm Europe wide. Therefore I used the paper negativ process after Henry Fox Talbot by placing fiber paper in the wooden mahagony film holders. The pictures from paper negatives show something what we can not see with our eyes. As Baryta Paper has a red and green sensibility gap, these rays do not affect the paper. Only the blue rays cause the strange black and grey-white reproductions.
Over many years I took the camera on my journies to Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, India, Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, China and Nepal. In the Spring of 1995 the camera was carried around the Anapurna massif on a three week tour over the Thorong La, a mountain pass of 5416 m hight, by our sherpa, mostly in flip flops.
Even after many years I'm still exited because I never know exactly how the pictures in this procedure will look like, if we will see the mountains in the background, if the sea and the sky will separate at the horizon or if the opposite side of the river will appear clear.

AUTHOR
Education
1979-1985 Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, sociology PHD
1984-1990 Academy of the Arts Düsseldorf, photography with Bernd Becher
Teaching
1992-1993 Kent Institute of Art and Design, Canterbury
1994-1995 Winchester School of Art, Barcelona
1996-1999 FH Düsseldorf, faculty of design/photography/film/AV
2000 Winchester School of Art, Barcelona
2005-2021 Senior professor; University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt
2013-2017 Visiting professor in Riga, London, Xi’an, Beijing, Wuhan, Kunming

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