'I grew up in an art-conscious parental home.

My grandfather was a sought-after landscape

artist of the Düsseldorf School. As a result, there

were beautiful paintings everywhere in the house,

including two large portraits of my great-grandparents

from the beginning of the nineteenth century,

which made a lasting impression on me as a

boy. So it's not surprising that, as a high-school

graduate, I photographed with my first 35 mm

camera on the first film a face, my own, a selfportrait.

That was in 1954.

After that, photography didn't let me go. So,

in the sixtyfour years until this day, I have recorded,

among my other topics, over four hundred

human faces, above all those of family members

and friends. I had studied geology and had become

a geologist, which meant making endless

journeys all over the world and also inevitably

making countless human contacts. So I could

also photograph human faces over and over

again in all the visited countries. As a geologist,

I usually only met people living in the countryside

such as farmers, shepherds, fishermen or

innkeepers, but hardly a city dweller.

With the help of the camera, I have tried to

capture the many expressive possibilities of the

human face, understanding that every face is

unmistakable.

I have experimented with various camera models

and film types of analogue photography, but

I said goodbye to them in 2014 in order to get to

know and to use the almost inexhaustible possibilities

of digital photography, most recently using

a monochrome Leica. I have, however, remained

as faithful as possible to one classical tool of photography:



the tripod.'