Design and Photography
First sentences quoted from:
Isabel Allende: La Casa de los Espiritus, 1982
E. L. Doctorow: The Waterworks, 1984
Brigitte Kronauer: Der Scheich von Aachen (The Scheick of Aachen), 2016
Daphne du Maurier: The Birds, 1952
Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot): Middlemarch, 1871-72.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, 1925
Jack Kerouac: On the Road, 1957
Stanisław Lem: Solaris, 1961
Robert Musil: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), 1930-1943
Ann Petry: The Street, 1946
Erich Maria Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues (Nothing New in the West), 1928
Christa Wolf: Juninachmittag (June Afternoon), 1967
The First Sentence
My posters on the first sentences of twelve acclaimed works of literature and their authors were displayed in the Berlin Literaturhaus 2023-2024. These posters are the result of an experiment: While re-reading the texts, I tried to transform them into collages, using historical prints, details from book covers and my own photographs. Within a year, I had a dozen drafts that I kept pulling out, revising, looking at together, putting back, adding to, and simplifying. At some point it didn’t work anymore, no revision seemed to make sense, mostly it just restored a previous state. A writer may recognize parallels to his own work here. You can see all twelve posters and read more about them on a separate website following this link.
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Portrait Photography Price
In 2018, I won a price at the Hellerau Award for Portrait Photography for a series of images I created following inspiration from world literature and art history. The winning portrait included in the catalogue was exhibited again in April 2025.
Other prizes I won before:
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Writing about Photography for the New York Times
I have written several articles for the New York Times magazine LENS since 2009. Two examples you can find online, follow this link to the article about Russian photo artist Oleg Videnin with twenty reader comments. The article about Adam Panczuk’s photography from Poland you can find here: lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/showcase-defying-the-odds-acting-oddly
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The cover of LAB EAST is by one of the best portrait photographers in Europe: Mirjana Vrbaski. She received the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize for this image the same year LAB EAST was published.
Link to complete book online with full essay, other texts and all portfolios: https://www.blurb.de/books/1681489-lab-east
LAB EAST – Publication about Eastern European Photography
TRAPPED? How to use this book.
by Walter Keller
“In late spring of 2010 Horst Kløver and myself put together the exhibition LAB EAST (Labor Ost) in Zurich/Switzerland within the framework of the national photo exhibition ewz selection. The public carefully looked at the show, spent quite some time discovering unknown creative talents that geographically speaking – Zurich is in Western Europe – stem from the “East”. Talking during and after the show with some of the visitors, I discovered what in culture anthropology would be called a “positive stereotype”. There was quite a bit of astonishment among the visitors that so much was going on among young photographers from the so called “East”. But I started having doubts about the whole labelling of our show by using the word “East”.
Do you get better credits or comments because you come from an “exotic” country that people from the West hardly ever travel to, while we seem to be familiar with capitals of Western nations or the USA as if they were our own cities? […] This book is necessary not because the work presented on its pages is “Eastern”, but because of the ghosts of the past still so present. Had Europe not been divided, would you care about “East” or “West” while browsing through this publication? Certainly not. Such contradictions are the blood of our times. In this sense, this book is about “The East”. But only in this sense.”
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Poster and Exhibition Design
I designed various posters for cultural and academic events.
ASSIGN AND ARRANGE is a poster in DIN A1 format for an international conference on the methodologies of presentation of art, video art and dance. The conference took place at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (link to the conference page, with flyer). A commission from: Free University FU Berlin, SFB 626 “Aesthetic Experience in the Sign of the Dissolution of Artistic Boundaries.”
ASIAN ART NOW! is the first gallery founded by Alexander Ochs in Berlin, which was active from 1997 until 2022 under different names. I created the poster (DIN A1) and promotional material for its first exhibition.
Exhibition and Book Design: Ulf Miehe – Aspects of an Author
In 2019, I initiated and hosted two successful events on the work of writer and filmmaker Ulf Miehe at Literaturhaus Berlin. This included an exhibition of 18 photographs of places in Berlin based on the novel “Ich hab noch einen Toten in Berlin” (I left a Dead One in Berlin).
In 2020, the exhibition moved on to the Wegemuseum in Wusterhausen/Dosse, Ulf Miehe’s birthplace. Together with the museum, I expanded the exhibition to include a “biography in fragments”, generously supported by Angelika Miehe. The result was a text-graphic-photo book with 82 pages. You can see it here online. I was also responsible for the conversion of the material into exhibition cubes for the museum. Under the title “Drehorte – Fotografien nach einem Kriminalroman” (Locations – Photographs after a Crime Novel) I have published a catalog for the photo exhibition.
Available online and in bookstores: Drehorte – Fotografien nach einem Kriminalroman (ISBN/EAN 9783751948654) / ULF MIEHE – Facetten eines Autors (ISBN/EAN 9783751936316)
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