Eleven to Twenty-one / My Youth in Photographs: a Dialogue
When I had my first passport photo taken at the age of eleven,
I didn’t know that it would be the first in a whole
series. And years later, when I had amassed quite a collection
of passport photos (~150) I didn’t know what to do with
them. Many years have gone by since the last images were created
in 1998.
The images started to tell their story. And the more I look
at them, the more other stories emerge from the background
and still more stories from behind these. Stories of love
and friendship, boredom and excitement, disappointment and
sorrow...
In 2005 I coincidently met Petra Coronato, a writer, in Berlin
and she picked up on the images. Over the next 18 months we
would produce a text to accompany the images and get images
and text published as a book.
The result is really my biography but it is not the real reason
for this project. Far more than the need to see my own life
story written down, it was important for me to explore the
impact of a series of unspectacular images, which is what
passport photos are, and where this process can lead. In this
sense my youth, adventurous, playful and confused as it was,
actually had rather a positive outcome and is representative
of many other life stories, which could have been investigated.
Nor am I alone in using photo booths and exploring their possibilities
beyond bureaucratic purposes, it’s just that I have
done so to a more excessive and rigorous degree than most.
And I never gave up on the thought that these images would
one day speak to me and tell me their story. With this very
personal book, in which I give information about myself with
an openness I have never displayed before and perhaps never
will again, the experiment has finished nearly 20 years after
it began.
