Gesichter / Faces

»I grew up in an art-conscious parental home.My grandfather was a sought-after landscapeartist of the Düsseldorf School. As a result, therewere beautiful paintings everywhere in the house,including two large portraits of my great-grandparentsfrom the beginning of the nineteenth century,which made a lasting impression on me as aboy. So it's not surprising that, as a high-schoolgraduate, I photographed with my first 35 mmcamera 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 hundredhuman faces, above all those of family membersand friends. I had studied geology and had becomea geologist, which meant making endlessjourneys all over the world and also inevitablymaking countless human contacts. So I couldalso photograph human faces over and overagain in all the visited countries. As a geologist,I usually only met people living in the countrysidesuch as farmers, shepherds, fishermen orinnkeepers, but hardly a city dweller.With the help of the camera, I have tried tocapture the many expressive possibilities of thehuman face, understanding that every face isunmistakable.I have experimented with various camera modelsand film types of analogue photography, butI said goodbye to them in 2014 in order to get toknow and to use the almost inexhaustible possibilitiesof digital photography, most recently usinga monochrome Leica. I have, however, remainedas faithful as possible to one classical tool of photography:the tripod.«