At this year it happened also to be the time of the documenta in Kassel. For the portraits I tried to experiment a little with perspective and distance and with some of the models it worked out quite well. It happened to be our last trip to an event like this in Europe, although we had some plans upcoming. But other work got a hold on us and we started to travel to Asia on a regular basis.

It was my second time in Kassel, not visiting the documenta but instead the cosplay event. For the first time I used a digital equipment for my portraits which I had to get used to. But tech talk beside I realised that the main problem was, as so often, that many girls did not know how to pose. My education and apprenticeship as photographer at a young age did help a lot. I learned it the hard tour at a small studio in my hometown, doing portraits of strangers for a living. I enjoyed the days in Kassel a lot as we stayed at a camping site in town and bringing our kids with us.

I visited Düsseldorf for the first time a couple of years ago with a friend from Art University who used to study there. Now around fifteen years later I realised that the city hosts the largest Japanese colony in Europe.

For that reason we enjoyed the city with alle the shops and restaurants as much as we did fancy the hanami spring-event. We stayed in a NH Japanese Hotel had Osaka Udon and the best mochi in town. The kids were well dressed up and the setting at the river with all the gathering was quite enjoyable.

The event in Berlin was quite early in the year and I think one of the first in the city of its kind. The meeting was also a good excuse to travel to Berlin and visit some museums which I did not do for a while. Manuel and me had a good time in Berlin, the photos were still analogue and in all it was a good training to walk up to strangers and let them pose for the camera.

It has been a small event at some school building in Vienna and was one of the first of its kind in 2010. I used my analogue equipment to make some portraits of the young girls. Very few boys mixed with the crowd, but more of the older creepy kind of sort. I did love that many of the costumes very not that perfect and had a kind of wabi-sabi charm. I am sure there was no intention to that, but is always weird when Caucasian people try to look Asian.

These portraits reassemble my first trip to a cosplay convention. Set in Kassel, Germany in 2010 the Comicon “Connichi” was at the time the biggest event so far. The pictures are made with an analogue medium format Mamiya, which was a challenge by itself. Most of the models were quite surprised that I could not show them the picture immediately. Part of my project was to work with different film material and cross-process it, a method which is not easy to control.