This picture is a kind of portrait. An inhabited, soulful person. A state of consciousness and lightness. I photographed the houses for the collage in Nice.

A conversation in an imaginary landscape. For me, the inner lives of people can be well visualized through architecture. Here, the inner becomes the outer. A person can be depicted as a bluethroat. Why not, if that best describes the magic of the moment? The architecture comes from Florence.

The profile face is me at about 6 years old. The buildings are from the villages near me. "Village 13" is home, the security one doesn't choose. Humans are poetry apparatuses. They transform shabby reality into a world full of feelings and stories.

A gate to another life opens. A big step full of hope and trust. The cat, as a friendly guardian of souls, is already there. The "Inner Garden" is connected. I first designed this picture as a black-and-white collage and then added the colors. This creates the character of a painted image. The houses at the top come from the cities of Lübeck, Stralsund, and Wismar.

We humans seem to be very domesticated today. But that's only superficial. I believe that we always carry our forest with us. The wilderness is within us. And what we consider to be the fixed shell of our lives is, in reality, on its way and undergoing change. Our culture cannot define us. And it is possible to seek oneself beyond it.

The city is a wild, confusing place, similar to a forest. For the half-timbered houses, I drove to the village of Strümpfelbach (Weinstadt). There are plenty of them there. The three men on the left come from the database “Anthropometric File of Anarchists”, a compilation of hundreds of police photographs of “anarchists” in France at the end of the 19th century. An image of the magic and horror of civilization.

A portrait of a couple. A petrified relationship? For me, architecture is well suited to depict human characteristics and relationships. The houses of the tower are from Wilhelmshaven.

Our experience of the world is a matrix of associations. I try to recreate this with my images. During the creative process, the image changes and develops in directions I had not foreseen. In the end, I reflect on what story the image might tell.

I found the picture of the girl in bulk waste, part of a historical family photo. It touched me immediately. What happens to a child's existential vastness? I captured the landscape during a photo trip in Northern Jutland, Denmark. An image about being at home. About security and fears.

This image was inspired by a trip to the north of Denmark. Perhaps it tells a father-son story, or perhaps an adult is looking back at himself as a child. The boy in the carnival costume touches me with his ambivalence and seriousness. He is not a cute child and he doesn't want to have fun right now. Who put him in that costume?