For my annual advent calendar, I have to choose photos. Going through my massive archives, I must swim rather quickly, or I will drown. This year I realized a curious thing: clicking at a certain pace will turn the material into a flicker book. Not totally unexpected, the inadvertent transition from photographic to cinematic still caught me off guard. Not only were the pictures turned into a jerky movie of last year’s photographic endeavors. The jerks, omissions and cuts revealed my tactics over time. For instance, my artist’s group met, and I wanted to document. Flickering through the results I was in the presence of my friends again, spying on them. The camera jumped about, but not too much, because the people I prey upon tend to calm down and carry on when my camera’s shutter becomes part of the background noise and I refrain from active terrain stalking. In my flicker book their eyes rarely meet my lens: I pass risk assessment.

Yet apart from all the meta-observations, my photos are still pictures of something, of somebody. Here you see German poets Jörg Hirsch and Michael Herrmann. Don’t they look like amicable bears discussing next winter?

Other portraits of mine.