The image in mind

If they’re old enough to remember Lady Di’s death.

It’s a memory of something seen, but not something experienced.

So making a model means limiting yourself to the essentials.

Then there was also an image of Pope Leo XIV looking at the new Ferrari. At first I thought, “I don’t believe it — that’s AI.” But he actually did it.

If that were the case, your works would primarily be a demonstration of craftsmanship: “Look how well I can cut out all these little leaves.”

Any schoolchild can do that. To be honest, with “Lichtung” I had a kind of instinctive reluctance to do it. I’d had the idea in my head for a long time, but thought I couldn’t do it because it really was kindergarten stuff. At some point, though, I thought the motif might be worth it if the picture turned out well — if, for example, it could hang alongside Dürer’s “Rasenstück” in an imaginary group exhibition. And then you just do it, even if it’s embarrassing. But I always try to keep the craft aspect out of the work. Basically, anyone could build a model like that if they looked at the image long enough.

But they would need time, and patience.

To come back to the subject matter: I don’t think a twenty-year-old today would look at “Badewanne” and think of Uwe Barschel. But simply through the way you painstakingly reconstruct these settings, you give people the sense that there is a reason why they are being shown this particular image. It is the exact opposite of a snapshot.

Some of them are immediately recognisable. The work “Presidency” appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 2008. It showed one of the central sites, if not the central site, of American politics: the Oval Office in the White House.

No, that’s not really the point. In every fourth American film there’s a president, and every time the Oval Office is recreated for it. It’s like “Hamlet” and the skull: you immediately know which play is being performed; you don’t need a complete stage set. But when the media machine that produces the very images I’m interested in then comes back to me, I do find that interesting. In a way, that brings things full circle. Because it has recognised that my images have qualities it can’t achieve with documentary or journalistic photographs.

How did you actually come to photography? You started out as a sculptor, right?

I had started at the Akademie der Künste in 1987, but I wanted to leave Munich and looked at three or four art academies. At the time, Konrad Klapheck was still teaching in Düsseldorf, and I absolutely loved his paintings. But Klapheck told me I probably wouldn’t be in the right place with him: “Go and see Fritz Schwegler.”

Fritz Schwegler was a painter and sculptor. His students included Gregor Schneider, Katharina Fritsch and Thomas Schütte.

I started studying with him because I wanted to do something completely different. In Munich, I had been painting. The one thing I had never really dealt with was sculpture. At the Düsseldorf Academy, a lot of people were making sculpture at the time. At the same time, I didn’t want to invest too much in it — because you never know whether what you’re making is complete rubbish. And my fellow students seemed to spend six months in a plastics workshop, only to come out with something that looked like a pot. That wasn’t really my thing either.

Is it true that you only started photographing because your sculptures weren’t meant to last, but were made of paper and cardboard?

No, and so of course the photograph of the sculpture didn’t reflect at all what I thought was beautiful or successful about the sculpture itself. It started with something as simple as a rectangular box looking completely distorted in the photograph. But the very thing that might be beautiful about that box is how regular it is. So I made two sculptures: one to photograph, and one the way it was actually supposed to be.

Exactly. As a student, you’re actually quite happy to have problems. You feel as though you can do anything. But where do you start? I did that for about a year, until I had a better grasp of the camera. It was a kind of declaration of independence from sculpture. That meant I could also throw the sculptures away with a clear conscience.

My idea at the time was this: if you were invited to do an exhibition, you would go there, walk into a stationery shop, buy the paper — which is the same everywhere — and make the sculpture on site. At some point, though, the photography took on a life of its own. It became a little larger, and then contexts began to emerge, like a shop window or something along those lines. Then I went upstairs to see Bernd Becher, because Schwegler knew just as little as I did about how to handle a camera. Bernd Becher said to me, “Well, you’ll have to train as a photographer. I can’t help you with that.” If you’re making two sculptures a day and would still like to photograph them that evening, that is of course exactly the opposite of what you want to hear.

Why was it that the famous founder of the photography class at the Düsseldorf Academy, of all people, couldn’t help you?

You moved to Goldsmiths College in London in 1993 and did your MFA there. What exactly was different in England?

Well, there are two aspects to it. One is a little more profound, more philosophical, and has to do with language. In German, you can’t leave anything open. You always need a subject, an object, a verb: “This is a work about such-and-such.” Which in itself doesn’t actually say anything. Because relationships have to be described so precisely, things in German art tend to be very clearly defined and almost idealised in the way they relate to one another. Katharina Fritsch, for example, then makes the idealised pot. It stands for the pot. In England, you would say: “Pot.” But which pot? My mother’s, or yesterday’s? Or the one in the restaurant? It’s about the specific pot that is actually there, not about all pots. I really do think that has something to do with language. But language is of course also a representation of how we understand reality. What I had thought was as precise as possible wasn’t precise at all — in this context, it was actually particularly imprecise. What people were doing at Goldsmiths also had an advertising aesthetic, but in a completely different way. It somehow had to work within three seconds. If it was a good work, more layers would reveal themselves afterwards. But if it didn’t work immediately and have that impact, it couldn’t be particularly interesting.

That was always one of the strengths of the Young British Artists as well — that precise impact.

At the time, the YBAs were riding a wave of success. They were full of confidence, which you could hardly blame them for after all those years of bitter invisibility in the art world. You kept seeing one successful statement after another. Soon the institutional platforms were created for it: the Tate, Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery.

What did the YBAs do differently from the Düsseldorf artists?

There was one thing after another, all working according to this principle of immediate impact. It was very interesting to see — including the perfection that went along with it. These weren’t little drawings made on a table; they were industrial productions. The fact that Hirst’s shark now sags a little in the middle takes away a lot of its original impact. But when it was still perfectly suspended, it was incredible to see. Or Richard Wilson’s surface of waste oil that you could walk into. It’s unforgettable. Today, you would probably hardly dare to use a material like that in this way at all.

In England, I was suddenly the German. I had no idea what kind of projection surface I had become. That was when I stopped simply being interested in things I happened to see around me and began asking myself: What is this, actually? What images do other people bring with them? Who am I in this context?

The dye-transfer images had a colour range and saturation that really came from the 1950s. Everything happened in the dark, in water baths. Each image took forty hours. That’s completely different from a photographic lab, where a print has to be ready after half an hour because otherwise it’s no longer economically viable. It’s incredible how much quality there is in the process. At some point I realised: it’s not really about the material itself, it’s about the experience of the people working with it.

For about twenty years. Guy Stricherz died two years ago, and that brought it to an end for me as well. The maximum size of a dye-transfer image is now limited to around 50 × 60 centimetres. Based on that experience, we started thinking in the studio about what we could do ourselves, so that we wouldn’t be dependent on large photographic labs and their economic ups and downs. One approach was to print directly onto Plexiglas or copper, without having to go through photographic paper.

There are also a hundred different kinds of paper. New ones are constantly coming out, and the old ones are no longer available… It drives you mad. And at the speed I work — in other words, at a snail’s pace — I can’t start from scratch every single time. So we wanted to bring the process under our own control somehow and started working with direct-to-substrate printers.

The images in your most recent exhibition at Sprüth Magers in Berlin were printed directly onto primed copper plates — a digital process in which the inks cure directly on the surface of the material.

If you do it properly, these printers now have a resolution far higher than photography has ever had. That’s also why we make the plates ourselves. We do as much as we can ourselves, so that we have some control over the process rather than simply picking up a finished product somewhere and hoping it turned out well. It’s a little old-fashioned. But I’ve always felt it was quite a limitation that with photography you’re tied to very specific colours because the colour gamut is simply restricted. Kodak yellow, for example, is warm. That means you can’t produce a cool yellow with Kodak film. But we perceive cool yellows all the time. And if you don’t have a cool yellow, you can’t produce certain greens either. Smartphones today also have completely different colour ranges from those of ten years ago.

The works in your exhibition at Sprüth Magers were made using this process. As always, the subjects are models made of paper, but these images are printed directly onto primed copper plates. At first glance they resemble paintings, but they aren’t.

I wanted to achieve the kind of presence a painting has. It isn’t a painting, but it has that kind of presence. At the same time, it’s important to me that the image remains photographic. It has a photographic source, and you can tell that there was something in front of the camera — that I didn’t paint the subject myself by hand.

It’s already built into my work that what you see there no longer exists. That has always been part of it. I’m not particularly nostalgic about that either. It’s simply annoying because it creates much more work. If you put me at a bar with three photographers now, I can’t really join in the conversation, because I know nothing about film and I have no interest in discussing the size of image sensors. I just want to concern myself with other things. Basically, I’m still the amateur who takes whatever he can get. By now, though, we’ve realised: I can’t get anything anymore, so I have to create something myself. But in a way, that’s how it has always been with everything — I build the world for myself.

Why is that, actually? Painters and sculptors also have manufacturers producing paints, canvases and so on.

The entire photographic industry is made for the mass market; it was never designed for artists. With large-scale photographic prints, for example, the mass market was advertising: in airports, for Sixt, for London, for L’Oréal. At some point, those companies started setting up their own photo labs because it was cheaper for them. The large labs — and there were only two or three of them in Germany — then shifted towards art, because by then art had also become a significant market. But of course nothing was ever invented specifically for us photographers. We always had to find a way of working with whatever was already there.

With their deserted settings, your works come very close to what is now often described as “liminal spaces”. Are you familiar with the term?

When I moved to New York in 1994, I always found it fascinating to walk home at night past those office towers. You see the fluorescent tubes above, and the light from them flickers down as if it were snowing. Or there’s this completely flat, shadowless light. And people sit in there until four in the morning finishing their Excel spreadsheets or whatever. I always found that coexistence of total triviality and New York — outside and inside — incredibly fascinating: what goes on in those fluorescent-lit rooms.

You could also say it’s the height of banality — a boring corridor in a boring high-rise.

There is almost nothing in the image — not even door handles or anything like that — and yet it is specific. Liminal spaces depend on being specific. The moment you turn it back into an idealised space — “the pot” rather than “a pot” — that would disappear as well.

But the video wasn’t actually made by Trump. It was made by two artists from San Francisco, and he didn’t realise that it was meant ironically. What interests me most is this meme that you now see everywhere: people want to show that they’re so rich they don’t care about anything, and they throw money into the air. In this case, it happens on the beach in Gaza, and someone who looks like Elon Musk is there as well. In my exhibition at Sprüth Magers, you see melons in blue transport crates — based on a case at the Mexican border in which someone had hidden meth inside paper melons [“Melonen”, 2025]. But if you google “watermelon” now, of course you immediately end up with Palestine. The watermelon became a substitute symbol for the Palestinian flag because of its colours — red, green, white and black — after public use of the flag was temporarily banned in the occupied territories.

I’d like to talk about the exhibition you recently curated in Vienna, “Passants parmi les Pierres” at fjk3 – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst. There is one work by Omer Fast that serves, in a way, as the thematic starting point. The photograph shows extras from the film “Schindlers Liste”.

In the background you can see the watchtower and the barracks with numbers on them. The people in the foreground are wearing prisoners’ uniforms and yellow stars, but they’re laughing. One of them is even holding a glass or something like that. None of it fits. And then you realise that our way of looking at photographs of concentration camps is so conditioned that it somehow feels immoral when someone in the photograph is laughing — and when the image is in colour as well.

And around that time, about thirty years ago, films from the Nazi era that had been shot in colour suddenly began to surface. It felt almost amoral to see that period in colour, because naturally it makes it much more attractive. That was calculated too: the Nazi combination of red, white and black looked extraordinarily seductive against the grey German cities of the time. When I later saw Omer Fast’s photograph from the set — he had given it to me — it reminded me of that debate, because the discussion around “Schindlers Liste” at the time revolved around exactly those kinds of questions: Is Spielberg allowed to make a Hollywood film about the Holocaust, or is there something immoral about that?

I’m friends with many of the artists. I simply asked them whether they had anything that might fit the theme. Thomas Struth, for example, usually makes either family portraits or photographs without people. At some point he dug out one from 1986 that he had never shown and never printed. It was the same with Yoshinori Mizutani and Akihiko Okamura. I simply asked various people; they showed me five or six things, and I chose from those.

With images like Omer Fast’s, it’s about a sense of disorientation — the fact that what you actually see doesn’t correspond to what you think you’re seeing. I wanted to encourage the viewer to trust that sense of doubt. So there were to be no wall texts resolving that contradiction and explaining what you’re seeing and why. Instead, I wanted to encourage people, at least for a moment, to trust the fiction they inevitably create themselves through this combination of people and architecture — in other words, the interpretation they bring to it. Clemens Setz is a master of the short form. It’s incredible how much he can fit into three sentences.

They are working models that were given to the scenic painters, who used them as the basis for painting the sets. Many of them were, and still are, simply thrown away in various places. In Vienna they kept them, and now they can’t throw them away anymore because they’re around 250 years old. In Monaco they have three or four models that are even part of the World Heritage. But originally they were only intended for internal communication between the architects — because it was mostly architects who designed the stage sets for the court. They belong to a courtly tradition, but they can’t be exhibited because they’re far too fragile.

Yes, and I wanted to bring them to life in some way. I’ve been pursuing the idea of photographing other people’s models since 2009. The architectural models by modernist architects such as John Lautner that I photographed at the time were also all working models. For the series “Model Studies”, I never used presentation models — the kind an architect uses to show a client what something is supposed to look like — but only those that were used for communication within the architecture offices themselves.

What is the difference?

What interests me most about models is their function as tools for understanding or communication. They need to have something my own models don’t have: patina, for example, or even traces of handwriting. In the case of the theatre models, it was the deterioration of the paper. In the end, they can become completely abstract. It isn’t about figuration, but about what kind of material it is — and what makes it model-like.

TOWARDS PHOTOGRAPHY is funded by the City of Düsseldorf.