Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp

Two influential men said to me when I was a teenager, that Auschwitz-Birkenau is a place you must have visited once in your lifetime. Neither of them said why.

Two years ago, in late 2010, I finally went to see the remainders of the largest nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. The six hour tour on that cloudy day in November shook me deeply. It was both haunting, depressing and very graphic. We were taking to the prisons, execution sites, and even walked into a gas chamber and the crematory. It was only then that for the first time I felt historically and personally attached to what was the industrialization of death and genocide less than 70 years ago.

I came back to Germany and already had the two pictures in mind that I wanted to post on this website. However, as I prepared the article, I just hat to stop because it made me deeply depressed. Now, two years later, I took the curate to go through the pictures, edit and arrange them for this gallery fighting with tears. But why?

Why should every person have seen this place, though you learn about the Holocaust in school, museums, movies and so forth? Because you need to see it for yourself to fully believe and understand it. You need to grasp the magnitude of the cruelty, atrocities and the senseless systematic killing of innocent people. Most of all, you need to see it to remember it, to tell your children and your grand children that Auschwitz is an important part of world history that must never be forgotten or denied.

Showing you this pictures and sharing this thought is the very least tribute I can pay to the victims of this madness made by human beings.

Click here or on any of the pictures below to access the gallery and the slideshow. There are no captions because I chose the let the pictures speak for themselves.

in memoriam

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Music and Shadows

This photograph shows one of the strangest scenes I have encountered in recent years. However, the picture alone is unable to transmit the bizarreness of the scene because it was the not just the fog, the light and the shadows but the loud music came from these three silhouettes walking down the street in this remote place just before nightfall. The father was moving a scooter with a big battery and a speakerbox, while his wife and child asked for money from people passing by.

Click play to listen to my brief recording and emerge into this strange scene. Where could this be?

Reminding us of our humble existence

I was sitting at the edge of one of the many cliffs at the Grand Canyon. A mild breeze blew onto my face, cooling my skin from the heat of that saturday in May. We had feared to be surrounded by hoards of other tourists but I we were lucky, as we were all alone heard nothing but the mountain wind.

It all felt so unreal and detached from life as I experienced it day by day. So here we stand as twenty-something year olds with a good fourth of our lives behind us, looking at a spectacular miracle that took over five million years of rivers, rain and ice to create. I had never felt this humbled by nature before.

Click on any of the images below or here to see my gallery of 25 impressions from the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.

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Holding together

I clearly remember the day and the instant I took this picture. I would not have expected that an image like this would come out of a sunday afternoon stroll around the Oktoberfest. Even though it is certainly not a perfect still, I thought I should absolutely publish this image on my website. Later that night, I tried to figure out something interesting to write about as a post but after several attempts, nothing satisfying crossed my mind. I just had to picture but no concept to it…

And so for over one and a half years, this peculiar picture rested on my harddrives together with tens of thousands of other images who have never seen the light of day (or the light of the internet). Until now.

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Das Auge isst mit

Delicious food! Whoever you are, wherever you are, there is always a distinct joy of savoring a tasty meal or snack. Germans like to say “Das Auge isst mit!”, which means that seeing your dish is part of the experience and hence part of the joy depending on how tasty and/or exquisite you think it looks.

In the near future I will publish a small gallery of pictures with local specialities from around the world, so regard this picture as an appetizer to the eye.

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Jump in !

Do you travel and take pictures of the journey or is taking pictures the reason why you travel?
If the answer for you is the latter, then you probably have photographic ambitions and want to go beyond documentation and snapshooting. Let us assume that your primary intention is share the photographs and tell a stories about the amazing things you can encounter all across the world. Well all know too well that hour long slideshows can be overwhelmingly boring. But how is that possible if the trip itself was amazing and what can photography do about it?

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Veins, Blood, Brains and Associations

Some years ago when I started going to art galleries, I always shook my head when I saw works named “untitled”. To me, this was simply a demonstration that the author just had no real concept in mind and wanted to get away with it by leaving no indication for interpretation – I drastically changed my mind years later.

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