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.«