Dancing with Myself
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In 2014, I turned 50. This number or age has certain meanings in certain cultures.
In the Hebrew world, for example, slaves would be granted their freedom at 50 and all obligations would be excused.
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Well, I’m still working and paying off my debt, but I wanted to document this particular jubilee in a diary. I took photos of all the hotel beds where I slept in during that year, capturing the traces of my presence in unmade beds the next morning. These traces were the evidence that “I was indeed there”. But this evidence is fleeting, like the moments I tried to capture with my camera, as all signs of my existence are erased by housekeeping just a few hours later after I leave.
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To expand on the locations, I added some more photos taken of things that grabbed may attention or noticed from the view from the window of my hotel rooms.
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During my work on “Jubeljahr,” it became obvious that I hadn’t been the first photographer with this idea. In a workshop, Bernhard Fuchs, a former Becher student, recommend the work of Hans-Peter Feldmann to me and I had a look at his approach to unmade beds and views from a hotel room.
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Further investigation led me to similar subjects in the work of Stephan Schenk, Sophie Calle, and Peter Dressler. but my approach was different in that I used my diary to capture a story. All these small pictures look like postcards of places, providing evidence that “I was indeed there”. The only difference to normal postcards is, instead of landmarks, these pictures show unmade beds, views from a hotel room, and the odd curious thing.
