When you were starting to be acquainted with photography, was there already the idea for what precisely you would like to achieve, or how did you take on that profession?
OW: Creating and exploring always was essential for me and on this way I passed through many stages and activities through out my earlier years. For example I did play in many music groups as drummer and later as a singer. We did a sort of subversive punk and industrial sound, but later when our guitarist drowned in his bath tumb with 22 years, we lost the musical soul of our band and we stopped soon after. The rest of us realized that we I weren’t really talented enough to continue alone without him or simply... just not talented at all making music. Seeing all this great Düsseldorf Bands like, die Toten Hosen, Kraftwerk, Fehlfarben, DAF, the Krupps performing around us it felt really clear that we don’t have much to say.
But already when we were working on the videos and photography for the band, I did realize, that doing pictures was much more my thing that trigger much more emotional feedback in me ( and others ) then making the actual music. My friends and surrounding, my studies in aesthetic theory at the university and the whole art context in Düsseldorf, where I was living at this time, stimulated me to do pictures.
At this time, I did not have any “well defined” idea of what I wanted to achieve. I just played around and everything was possible. My first personal projects like “glass”, series on prostitutes in Amsterdam presenting themselves in their shop windows, is from that time and I still like it.
More and more fashion and editorial photography came into my field of view. The long impressive 90 th stories of Peter Lindbergh in Vogue Italia and all the good stuff out there in books made with love and passion, like Saul Leiter, Henri Lartigue, Walker Evans or japanes photographer Shomei Tomatsu to name just a few, was so stimulating that I wanted to be part of it and do my pictures and stories as well, filling pages in Vogue Italia and doing books.
Many years after I did meet Franca Sozzani, the former editor in chief of Vogue Italia in Café Flore in Paris and I did shoot for Vogue Italia afterwards. So a dream came true, but as often reality is less exciting then the dream of it and when you achieve things and worked for it so hard it leaves a subtile strange taste stimulating the motivation for more. Since then I did work for a long list of great magazines and clients such as many different other Vogues, Interview, Rolling Stone, Numero Tokyo Dries van Noten, Nike, Kenzo, Cartier.
You’re talking about cinematic photography as a central theme of your photography, what does such practice characterize? I’m sensing certain lightning and particular angles...
OW: Cinematic photography is about capturing moments and implicates motion and emotion. It has a human and narrative touch, it does not feel staged. For me a picture is good when it could be a “still frame” outtake of a movie.
“Cinematic” for me means, thinking and seeing the picture before and after the actual photograph, creating images in movement on a storyline with the most “movie” feel and light possible. That leeds me very closely to the work habits you find in proper feature film making.
In film language you would say, I’m a film director and director of photography at the same time. Before I do a shoot I prepare story and mood boards like I do it as a director. All scenes are set up’s and prepared even when it looks like very spontaneous. They are not snapshots they are photographs. By creating light situations like on a movie set, mixing daylight with additional light elements like neon.
My visual culture is strongly influenced by great filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean Luc Godard, Antonioni, John Cassavates and Wim Wenders, to name just a few. Framing and light I did learn here. I watched them intensively and got sucked into their universe. Also in my stories I try to be as much as I a “moment generator”, a storyteller. More and more I do, reel film projects as well, for example a film on Sumo, some adds and other short moving picture sequences. I really enjoy it and there is a lot to do for me here.
Do you see yourself as a photographer or as an artist or how would you define your profession?
OW: You can be an artist beeing a photographer. I see myself as a hybrid being both, depending on what mission I’am and it feels ok to be both.. All depends on what pictures you do, if it’s art or not.
I can express myself and have a great time working on a fashion story for a magazine and working on an long term art project the next day. One don’t has to exclude the other. The link between my fashion and artistic work is always the moment in different sorts of forms. I define myself more widely as a curious image maker.
Fact is that you can not make art in a fashion story. Of course we see great creative pictures but these aren’t selfish enough to be art. Marshal Mc Luhan’s quote :”the medium is the message” is still up to date and brings it to the point. You make pictures in and for a context. The value and meaning of your images entirely changes depending on the place they are published in.
Talking about my profession in general: I started photography in the era of film, developpement, contact sheets, push and pull processes and shoot countless roles of films in every film format. I did learn how to develop and print my images, experimented with cross process, different film typs and polaroid a lot. The first fashion b/w portraits I did where for Dries van Noten. They where used in a book and catalogues. Selfprinting, I stuck around 30 different prints for drying on every spare centimeter of the bathroom like a wall paper. I want to say, that photography took a lot of space and time. Since then photography became much more easier and accessible for everybody, that’s good and democratic. Digital photography made a lot of things easier and processes faster but certainly the pictures not better. I don’t want become to nostalgic about it but we need to handle images with more care before they are getting to be progressively just soulless mass products we don’t see anymore. I realized that there is less and less professionalism since borders of our jobs in the industry are disappearing. The market of professional photography, the attitude towards images completely changed with constant bombarding of images. A lot of people seeing themself as professional photographer only because they have a camera / smartphone and an instagram account.
It’s not that simple, there are certain things you got to learn. Images loosing permanently it’s value by posting more and more shit. That’s how it is and we got play with this now but it’s tough to surf the tsunami wave of pictures and their “non restricted accessibility”.
It’s absolutely OK, being democratic on opening professional borders, but very often the lack of image culture and education, makes the result quite painful. When - everybody tries everything- stylist, models, art directors shooting stories because they get the opportunity to do so. No reel photography education seems to needed anymore, which will lead to make an entire profession disappear. Welcome to the big mess.
At this current moment it’s very important to get back to play mode and do and not following blindly in realtime current trends in image-making since this only can be the slow death of identity.
What about absence, trance and ephemeral space which you name as main subjects that influence you as an artist? Why do these things in particular fascinate you?
OW: In my personal work I follow a much more abstract “momentism”, I’m interested in the “vanishing point” of situations, the hidden sides of stories. Here I’m taking away the obvious narrative and work just with hints. A pending picture which leaves me “not knowing” but more “guessing” makes an image far more interesting for me. Analysing philosophical texts in the university, introduced me to this “openness” that keeps all meaning floating and “reading between lines” became the right method for me.
I studied philosophy and art history. It was all about crossing lines between art and everything around, a big “everything touches everything”.
My doctorate paper; ‘The aesthetic rest: remarks on a aesthetic of the moment. The moment in contemporary art and philosophy’ and was published in 1991. This work locates being in the aesthetic act of ephemeral spaces that are brought to me in many different ways through my visual studies. This “being” seems ‘to happen’ in the ‘act of the moment’. This point I call ‘moment’, stands for "a culture of play, a ghost- presence, breaks, cuts and process, which is for me basically the fundamental position in contemporary art and aesthetic theory. I moved to Paris in the late 90’s establishing myself as a photographer. My photographic and video installation’s explore, in essence, the spontaneous identity of photography as visual metaphors routed my research. The theme of “absence and the hypnotic quality”. My subjects
( ex. exhibition: windowblack ) leading us to specific places of “emptiness”. These subjects move the viewer into a void of abstraction. We witness traces and spectral existence, untouchable and vague moments through landscapes. The images depict absence and qualities of apparition creating spaces for contemplation. This layer in my work provides little yet gives details to the viewer to search for everybody's ‘right to see’ ( Derrida ). My photography beacons the viewer to search for these moments as traces based on a paradox; his pictures insist to show that “absence is a very present subject”. The viewer is left to search further within himself to the image codes. They provide everybody’s right to see a blank canvas; a placeholder for stories.
While the image is permanently ‘open’, an oscillation in appearance and disappearance fleets the image. These vanishing points create the hypnotic quality of the image as the exploration of fleetingness crystalizes in the ‘sublime’ What best describes my artistic guideline is the “punctum” of R. Barthes and the “auratic” moment in the sense of W. Benjamin.
My work carries echo’s and materializes art theory and art practice. Asking about image-making, all pointed in the same direction. I realized that I always ended up with the same fascination for “absence” in my pictures and the “hypnotic nothing” as a selection quality.
I try to capture the “transcendental”, the “anthology of nothing”, the “radiance of eternity” in some sort.
I think that my photographs have a certain quality that slow the viewer down and point to imaginary double-life of things, they are in-visible, they are not showing, permanently self-extracting, they are more like noise, very subtle like the noise of the ocean on the bottom of a shell. They are filled with this inviting emptiness, the radiance of eternity and the abstract impression of absence. Someone recently said, that it an “archeology of abstract and hidden spaces”.
As from knowing your background writing your doctorate in “L'instant dans l'art et dans la philosophie contemporaine” (The instant in art and in contemporary philosophy), it would be interesting to hear more about your opinion on where fashion and art intersect. How do you personally as a photographer, experience such - let’s say - ‘symbiosis’?
OW: My doctorate and research, did not help or stimulate me for my work in fashion. Even tough it is fundamental for my artistic work. Both sectors play by different rules and the does not work the same way. Even when you can do great and highly creative work in fashion, -fashion is fashion and art is art-.
For me the most attempts to make art in a fashion story are ridiculous. They are not “free enough” to be art, since you still sign with brand names and they are made for purpose to sell in a fashion or beauty context, so it loose all credibility being a “non_distracted_personal_expression”, art needs to be. As I mentioned in the beginning, “the medium is the message”.
What is the difference between having your pictures to be shown at an art gallery and in a Magazine? Could one say that a magazine is much more of a commercialized platform and that a gallery would provide way more freedom for a picture to be shown?
The fashion and the art market are different in structure and behavior, but the are still both markets. In magazine you “sell” fashion or beauty content and not yourself. Showing pictures in a magazine is less long lasting the fashion cycles are fast market cycles and the photography goes with it.
The work you show in galleries is usually less compromised and more independent since you are showing your unfiltered expression. It should have a more timeless transcendent quality. Do you feel that the fashion industry is pressuring you to follow certain rules or would you argue otherwise?
OW: What is pressuring most , it’s not only a fashion industry but a more global attitude. Scrolling and liking, zapping, being “liked” pressure is becoming ridiculous. It’s the extreme loss of orientation in media where we are loosing our sense and our senses. On the last Documenta 17 in Kassel I have seen an artist quote framed on a wall, saying “don’t post art”. I agree entirely. Art is too precious and it’s “transcendence” can’t be transmitted in posts. Constant information and image bombarding makes us dump to see.
Specifically talking about the fashion industry. I did always prefer to stand a bit aside and observe fashion with a respectful distance. It helped me to do better pictures and work with fashion the purest and unspoiled way into my stories.
But yes, fashion circles and communications going faster and urge you to adapt. I think it’s ok to observe and adapt but not until you loose your photographic soul.
How do you think about the independent magazine ‘movement’ from a photographer’s point of view? It would be quite interesting to know if there is any difference between such and institutions - so to speak – like Vogue.
OW: The commercial established magazines have more and more very tight possibilities to work freely. It’s often more about shooting the clothes in a specific way in order to please their advertising clients. It’s very political the editors and teams getting a lot of pressure. Sometimes it feels more like doing advertising then doing editorial. Even though, they are still an important platform to be published in and they still have budgets to travel and work under good conditions.
In opposite to this, there are the independent magazines doing a great job allowing more personal independent subversive vision on things and you feel a credibility in what they do and how they do it. You can see the enthusiasm and energy everybody involved brings to paper. I love theses and image-vise it’s motivating to work for them. The bitter part is that you mostly pay your own production costs, like material light, travel costs, assistants etc. etc. but you usually get a good publication.
But there are also the “so called” independent magazines, that are somewhere in- between commercial and independent.
“Independence” seems to be just a label of commercial, but not idealistic use. They are hyping things often superficially without really knowing and caring, just to create content to fill a magazine to make it interesting for the advertisers to place their adds in there. The pressure is still there to shoot certain clothes and girls and the editing process is quite tough, since there are not really respecting the photographers choices, but still the photographers have to pay the production. Theses magazines are ” no fun” and for my taste to avoid.
Is there anything in particular that you are working on at the moment?
OW: I’m currently finalizing two of my longterm photography and video projects. the first one is on Sumo bodies; I did shoot over 2 years time in Tokyo and another series on water fountains, called “ghosts”, exploring the possibilities of mixed media by using paint and photography. We are started sending work out to photography competitions, something we never did before. Besides the preparation of new some new editorials and new portraits, I’m looking forward moving into my new office space.
Photography is still a great adventure for me and I’m a happy person when I’m holding my camera in my hands.