‘Why is landscape beautiful?’ asked Lucius Burckhardt when he invented ‘walk science’ in the 1980s. This question also accompanied our photo excursion to the North Sea island Norderney in November 2019: What can you expect from
nature in a strongly tourist-oriented place? What happens to the landscape when an island expects half a million
visitors a year? Lucius Burckhardt’s approach taught us not to be prejudiced by popular assumptions.
My photo series ‘Unfamiliar Home’ (dt. Fremd in der Heimat) is part of the group project from the HfK (Hochschule für Künste, engl. University to the Arts). My work addresses the youth culture on Norderney: How do young people on the
island deal with their tourism-dominated home? How do they find a place that is theirs? The strategies are very
different: some dream away, others consciously stay home or come back later. In my images I have portrayed young people and positioned them in the agricultural landscape. The focus is for the pictured people to be only dimly
recognizable against the agrarian countryside. Additionally, I composed pictures on the streets, and on the outside of closed rooms. Since I was working in the evening, I had to take images in very low light. I wanted to be respectful of the actual environmental mood and situation, and not to
alienate my subjects by using a flash. This enabled the night to continue to belong to the islanders.
Returning to Bremen I collaborated with a group of curators on an exhibition connecting my images with the works of 18 other students.
‘Why is landscape beautiful?’ asked Lucius Burckhardt when he invented ‘walk science’ in the 1980s. This question also accompanied our photo excursion to the North Sea island Norderney in November 2019: What can you expect from
nature in a strongly tourist-oriented place? What happens to the landscape when an island expects half a million
visitors a year? Lucius Burckhardt’s approach taught us not to be prejudiced by popular assumptions.
My photo series ‘Unfamiliar Home’ (dt. Fremd in der Heimat) is part of the group project from the HfK (Hochschule für Künste, engl. University to the Arts). My work addresses the youth culture on Norderney: How do young people on the
island deal with their tourism-dominated home? How do they find a place that is theirs? The strategies are very
different: some dream away, others consciously stay home or come back later. In my images I have portrayed young people and positioned them in the agricultural landscape. The focus is for the pictured people to be only dimly
recognizable against the agrarian countryside. Additionally, I composed pictures on the streets, and on the outside of closed rooms. Since I was working in the evening, I had to take images in very low light. I wanted to be respectful of the actual environmental mood and situation, and not to
alienate my subjects by using a flash. This enabled the night to continue to belong to the islanders.
Returning to Bremen I collaborated with a group of curators on an exhibition connecting my images with the works of 18 other students.