Journey into me
What tools are young people actually given today as they set out into the world – a world in which even their parents hardly have any answers to life's central questions? What promises are adolescents offered as consolation when those who make them are later unwilling or unable to take responsibility for the consequences? The Journey into the Self begins precisely here: as a visual exploration of childhood and adolescence, as an attempt to make the inner landscapes of a young person visible through photography. The series works with deliberately chosen symbols and concrete, real spaces that become a resonance chamber for inner sensitivities. The meaning of each image therefore lies not in the story it tells, but in its visual language – in what happens between the signs, the atmosphere and the viewer's gaze. Puberty forms the starting point: that moment when a person begins to question their own existence. The phase of imitation, identification or seemingly rebellious. Differentiation marks the first tentative attempts to formulate one's own identity. The coldness palpable in the images is an expression of the feeling of being alone – confronted with a world that is subjectively perceived as threatening and offers neither orientation nor protection. Each scene is a distillation of emotional truth, an attempt to make the powerlessness and injustice of this phase of life visible in a precise and unambiguous way. The choice of large-format photography is not a technical coincidence, but a conceptual component. The deep sharpness of detail reinforces the objective realism of the scenes, precisely because their meaning is deeply subjective. This tension between external precision and internal abstraction serves to visualise invisible mental processes – and at the same time forces the viewer to perceive them more closely and with greater irritation. The slow, physically demanding process of taking pictures with a view camera, the exposure to cold and the environment, was deliberately chosen as a parallel to the emotional state of the young people depicted: a grasping, an enduring, a recognising. There are numerous parallels to this project in art history. The self-portraits of great artists – such as Albrecht Dürer's iconic self-portrait in the Alte Pinakothek – were never mere depictions of the exterior. They were attempts to understand one's own being, to withstand one's own gaze, to interpret one's own existence. The artist appears as a questioner, not as a knower. This struggle for self understanding, this effort to translate the inner self into pictorial form, runs like a thread through the centuries – from the Renaissance to the present day. The Journey into the Self follows this tradition. It is not a nostalgic retrospective, but a contemporary form of existential self-portraiture. It is not the face, but the inner spaces, the symbols, the atmospheric condensations that take on the function of the portrait. The images do not attempt to provide answers – they attempt to make the urgency of the questions visible. For life, especially in its early years, is often cruelly difficult. And art remains one of the few places where people can question their own existence with the necessary depth. This work is therefore not only a document, but an ongoing approach to the truth of one's own path: a visual struggle for clarity that will never be complete.
