Photographer & geographer from Bernau am Chiemsee at the edge of the Bavarian Alps, Germany. Forests and mountains are my favorite subjects. Also fog plays a huge role in my photography as a natural stylistic device.
Born in 1985, I originally come from Tännesberg in Eastern Bavaria, close to the German-Czech border. The sparsely populated landscape of this region has been familiar to me since my childhood. In 2004 I already spent one year of my life at the edge of the Alps (Benediktbeuern). When I started studying geography in Bonn in 2006, the visual impressions of urban landscapes along the Rhine were added to my “experienced environments”. Till 2021 I lived many years in Ehrenfeld, a dynamic district of Cologne. However, at the beginning of 2021 I moved to Lake Chiemsee in Upper Bavaria. Closer to my core photographic area, which stretches from Eastern Bavaria across the Eastern Alps to the Dolomites.
For me, landscape photography is the optimal way to combine geography as the science of space with the photographical aesthetic perception of natural spaces. I aim to open people’s eyes to the hidden beauty of our everyday’s landscape. But of course I also like the big vistas. The scenes I show appear untouched at first – but often they also also show traces of human activity. Natural landscapes and cultural landscapes merge seamlessly, especially in Central Europe. The direct and indirect influence of humans on the environment can be seen in such images: climate change as well as increasing pressure on nature through touristic mass individualism. Summed up landscape photography documents the visible essence of the geographical and cultural history of a place in addition to its beauty.
But also landscape photography has changed in the last decade. In the slipstream of emerging social networks, it became more and more a popular leisure activity. Natural subjects are no longer just captured but also actively changed due to the increasing numbers of visitors.
A unique selling point as a photographer is my partial color blindness (dyschromatiopsia) – a strength and not a handicap. Red-green blindness allows me to perceive patterns and structures in nature better than people with normal vision. This is particularly useful for forest photography. My twilight vision is also better due to the color vision deficiency. Especially during the twilight of the “blue hour” it’s useful to find my subjects and compositions. So my special vision combined with the “normal” vision of the camera allows me to discover subjects that are hidden to most people without any color vision handicaps.
