To get the right atmosphere, I decided to use real sets and limit the amount of post production to an absolute minimum. Thanks to set builder Nils Emde for creating these modern day pillories. Here you see the lead pictures of the series:

In 2006 startete das Greenpeace Magazin mit der Kolumne “Tu Was!”, einer Serie mit “Denkanstößen für eine Bessere Welt”. 77 dieser Tipps, von denen ich 24 fotografiert habe, gibt es jetzt als Buch. Ein großer Spaß und ein perfektes Geschenk.
Bestellen kann man es HIER

To complete the magnificent seven, there were also Claudio Bonoldi from Milan,  Feco Imperio Hamburger from Sao Paulo,  Elisabeth Montagnier from Marseille, Janolof Fritze  from Gothenburg, Michael Rauner from San Francisco, and Nii Takao from Nagasaki – all sister cities of Shanghai.

Our Chinese hosts provided each of us with a guide (a local photographer from the Shanghai Photographers Association) and a translator, to tackle the ambitious schedule that was layed out by the organizers.
Not only did we extensively criss cross the huge metropolis of Shanghai, but we also found out why it is probably going to be the next New York, why big tables should be round and that you can eat almost everything without any serious side effects.

Because of our glorious efforts it was of course inevitable, that the Chinese media tracked us down eventually with around 30 photographers and a couple of film teams.
A true “red carpet moment”. We made big news!

I especially thank my translator Zhuang Yadong (Mike), who not only switched between Shanghainese, Mandarin, German and English, to bridge the occaisonal linguistic and cultural difference, but was also patient enough to find me cool new suede shoes. Big thanks also to the organizers Chen Qiwei, Sun Weimin, Pengfei Li, Stephanie Tang, Lesley, Jiayi Zhu and my guide Hao Xiaohu.

In the same issue there is my reportage on the mismanagement of Indonesias
“Komodo National Park”, and it’s most prominent resident – the Komodo Dragon.

More information
Order the magazine

After not having used my darkroom for the last two years, I have finally decided to get rid of it altogether. Checking the prices for used enlargers on Ebay tells me, that the stuff won’t even pay for a decent meal anymore.
Next to the processor is a shelf full of old prints, which also needs a bit of trimming down. Today I started looking at a couple of boxes, and amongst photos that make me blush, I’ve retrieved a few old pearls, that will pop up in this blog every now and then. This one was taken on a college trip to Cherbourg, France in 1990.

At the end of last year I was asked to contribute an image, to a recently launched photo edition by the German magazine “Emotion”. The idea behind the selection is, that the image possesses a strong emotional quality for the photographer. I chose a picture that was taken near a national parc in Thailand in 2010, where millions of bats leave their cave at dusk every night, to hunt for food. An overwhelming and poetic sight.

You can buy the photo HERE!

My first logbook entry marks a very sad occasion.
On Saturday, April 2 my soulmate Marc died in Berlin. He would have turned 41 today. The last time we spoke we talked about his new book ‘Hobalala’, how happy he was that he had finished it in time, and that we would meet up soon for his birthday.

Hard to believe that there will be no more mutual adventures, like the one last year, where we raced through Hanoi on dodgy motorbikes.

I miss him terribly. He made me laugh and drove me mad. Farewell old sport.

For my book “Toast Hawaii” he wrote a short story, which you can read here:

A GOOD
PAIR OF
GLASSES

by Marc Fischer

It all began with a man in Tokyo going around stealing peoples’ glasses off their noses. He would appear, apparently from nowhere, grab the glasses he wanted and then disappear again without a trace, just as he had come. That is, if all went smoothly.
If people couldn’t be so easily separated from their glasses, the glasses guy sometimes would beat them. At least that’s what the victims said, almost twenty by now. One even had his arm broken. A German magazine wanted a story about it.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘We find it exotic,’ they said. ‘It says something about the state of the world
since 11 September.’
‘It does?’
‘Uh, hello? Don’t you see the metaphor?
It is about worldview and perception, viewpoint, perspective. It’s really great stuff!’
‘But how do I find him? Hardly any of his victims have ever seen him properly. He
arrives on the scene, makes his grab like
a shadow from the crown, like an assassin.’
‘Just be a bit investigative for once!’
The photographer they sent me made
the trip especially from Hamburg. His name was Enver Hirsch. ‘Hirsch, as in deer?’
I asked on the phone. ‘And Enver like the dictator,’ was the reply.

Since I always like to know who I’m dealing with, I made some enquiries about this Hirsch. I learned that he liked to photograph dead animals and had just returned from an expedition to a toxic gas island. In addition, once a year he dissolved into thin air and
returned with a huge heap pf photographs of plastic dolls. Why dolls? Why once a year? Where did that take place? Strange guy.
A few days later I picked him up from
Narita airport. He was, well, of medium height and pulled an orange suitcase behind him, in which three men his size could
have fit. His camera was not much smaller.
He wore a red Burberry jacket up to the
part in his hair and was on the whole very British. His accent was almost as strong as that of Prince Charles.
‘Well, well, well,’ he greeted me.
‘So we are doing a story about a super
crazy glasses thief?’
‘Precisely,’ I said.
‘And how will we find him? Do we put
an ad in the papers?
‘First we will buy some glasses, I thought.’
‘Excellent idea!’ Hirsch said. He pronounced ‘excellent’ like Peter Ustinov.
The glasses shop was in the Ginza neighbourhood. It was the best eyeglasses shop in all of Tokyo, I had researched that especially. They had all kinds of glasses
there: horn-rimmed glasses, steel-rimmed glasses, rectangular glasses, round glasses, designer glasses, off-the-rack glasses, celebrity glasses, secretaries’ glasses, sun glasses, protective glasses, glasses for the near-sighted, glasses for the short-sighted. It was a glasses paradise, just the right place to start our research.
‘I’ll take the large brown one here!’ Hirsch exclaimed after trying a few models. ‘Suits me, don’t you think?’ On his face, the frame looked like a felt-tip pen that kept drawing thick circles round his eyes.
‘Perhaps a little too Yves-Saint-Laurenty,’
I said.
‘Just right then.’ Hirsch was happy.
‘And you, what will you take?’
‘These black ones here.’
‘Ah, Andy Warhol style. Not bad either.
Expense accounts are something wonderful, aren’t they?’
I had to agree to that.
A few minutes later we were on the street, with our glasses with plain glass
lenses on our noses. It was early evening. Millions of Japanese flooded the sidewalk around us. They came from work or were on their way to restaurants or the cinema. Some of them wore business suits, others didn’t. Some of them wore glasses, others didn’t. Only one thing was certain: the
glasses we wore were the biggest of any
of them. Seen from God’s perspective,
that is, from the beautiful sky down to
the earth covered with buildings, we were
two guys with haloes made of plastic around our heads. We looked like a couple of Jim Hanson muppets.
‘And now?’ Hirsch asked.
‘Now we wait,’ I said. The bait is ready,
now the glasses shark just needs to bite.’
‘Cheeky!’ said Hirsch.
‘Isn’t it?’
We let ourselves be pulled along by the throng of Japanese around us; we floated through Roppongi, Harajuku, and Shibuya, into and out of the tube, onto squares
and then away from them, into cafés and then out of them, for hours. The glasses man was nowhere to be seen.

At same point, it was late already, we were sitting in a bar, still with our glasses on,
staring at the other customers encouragingly. One of them could after all have been the glasses man. After the third gin and
tonic Hirsch said out aloud what had gone on silently inside of us for a while.
‘Well, well, well, I don’t know how
you usually work, but perhaps we need to change our tactics.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘It is not enough to merely wait for the
glasses man. We have to take a much
more criminological approach, like in
The Silence of the Lambs – you know this work of dramatic film making?’
‘Yes, agent Sterling.’
‘Good. So we have to put ourselves in his position – find out what kind of person he is. Does he steal for himself or somebody else? Does he suffer from some kind of trauma? Is he attracted only to a certain type of
glasses, or is he interested in all kinds? Does it matter how strong the lenses are, or the manufacturer? The details are decisive. Have you contacted the victims yet?’
‘First thing tomorrow morning.’
‘Excellent, my friend. Let’s have another drink, then we’ll go to bed and each of
us will imagine the glasses thief as precisely as possible.’
I did as the photographer had ordered.
I crept into bed next to Yasuko, squinted my eyes shut and thought of the glasses man. Where did he come from, who was he? Was he roaming the city right now, with
defective eyesight, looking for correction?
Why didn’t he go to the doctor for laser treat-ment? A strange, peculiar, opaque world.

Early the next afternoon we had our first meeting with one of the victims. A colleague at the Japan Times had put us in touch with Naoko Seragaya, a forty-year-old lady with short hair. She lived in a one-and-a-half-room flat in Yokohama and commuted every day by train to Tokyo, where she worked as a secretary in an advertising agency. It had been two weeks since she had been attacked by the eyeglasses thief, but the shock was still present: the eyes behind her scratched substitute glasses were wide open when she opened the door for us, as if her pupils had been frozen into place since the attack.
‘It is very kind of you to receive us,’ said Hirsch and bowed deeply to Ms Setagaya.
‘I also want you to know how much we share your grief at the loss of your glasses.’
‘Thank you very much’, said Ms. Setagaya and also bowed. Then, in a very un-Japanese way, she broke into tears. ‘I am so sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘It is just that I don’t understand how one a person can rob glasses from another human being. Taking some-one’s glasses is like taking his soul.’
Hirsch nodded understandingly and patted her shoulder. She told us how on that day she had taken the train to the city like every day, to Shinjuku station, where she had switched to a local train that would take her to work. When she wanted to change trains again at Shinjuku that evening, she was suddenly grabbed from behind while a hand ripped the glasses that she had worn so successfully for years from her nose.
Before she knew what had happened, the perpetrator was gone. Unfortunately she could not describe him – with her serious nearsightedness.
‘How do you know that it was a man?’
‘By the way he grabbed me. By his hands.’
‘Hmm,’ said Hirsch in the manner of a Special Detective Inspector from Scotland Yard.
‘Hmm, hmm, hmm.’
‘Have you ever noticed anybody in your
surroundings or circle of acquaintances who could have been keen on your glasses?’
I asked because I also wanted to say some-thing. Ms. Setagaya shook her head as if the question were completely absurd.
‘Was there anything special about your
glasses?’
‘It was a completely normal pair of glasses. A steel frame, cheap, bought in a little shop in Atami.’
‘Year of manufacture?’ Hirsch wanted to know.
‘I got them as a present, in 1989, I think,
from my boyfriend at the time.’
‘You are single now?’
‘Unfortunately yes,’ said Ms Setagaya.
‘Is that important?’
‘Everything could be important. May I take
a photograph of you? But please without the glasses.’ Ms Setagaya gave us a short disturbed look, but then she took her substitute glasses off and looked as if blind into Hirsch’s mid-format camera. It seemed as if she were looking through him, to the place where she hoped to find her stolen glasses. For the first time, I understood the power of the glasses thief; what he had done to his victims, how enormous the horror and the pain must have been. He had pushed them out of the world. Hirsch took the shot.

The second victim we visited was a young man, in his mid-twenties. He was not quite as traumatised as Ms Setagaya. He, too, had been attacked at Shinjuku station,
like most of the victims. He was the one whose arm had been broken. However,
he admitted that that had been more of an accident than an intentional attack by the glasses man.
‘When he wanted to grasp my glasses – with a really pretty Armani frame, by the way – I started lashing about and slipped. I fell the wrong way on my elbow, and broke it.’
‘Did you see the man?’
‘No. I only know that he must have worn something light, a jacket. I saw it because
I tried to hold on to it as I fell.’
‘Did you notice anything else? A sound,
a smell, anything of that kind?’
‘Now that you mention it: I remember that he smelled of ginger.’
‘Ginger?’
‘Yes, that sliced ginger that they always
put on your plate with Sushi. I don’t care for it much myself.’
‘You went out to eat before you wanted to get on the train?’
‘Yes, in a small rotating sushi joint I like
to go to: Sushi Express, do you know the place? Not at all bad.’
‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
‘Just one? Are you mad? I am still young!’
Before we left him, the man remembered something else. A few minutes before
the attack, he told us, he felt quite uneasy: ‘Observed, as if stripped. As if a really
thirsty vampire wanted to suck all my blood. Horrible!’

Victim No. 3 was once again a woman, this time quite elderly. She didn’t quite fit the pattern insofar as she was attacked outside Shinjuku station, not inside like the others.
‘I was very startled, and unfortunately
I dropped the package of sushi I had just
picked up.’
‘You had been to a restaurant?’
‘Yes, Sushi Express, inside the station.
They always have pretty inexpensive lunch offers.’
Hirsch grabbed his phone, rushed from
the room and returned two minutes later, slightly disappointed: Ms Setagaya had not eaten at Sushi Express. But she did often pass the shop.
The next day, we sat there. There was no guarantee that he would come, it was
just an idea. We didn’t have much to go on: in the eight-million-people city Tokyo, we were looking at the most popular train sta-
tion for a man who maybe liked the sushi here, always ate all of his ginger, maybe
wore a light jacket, and had a manic preference for other people’s glasses. It was a nice little place in an underground pass, with neon lighting, twelve seats and a pretty waitress in the morning, and a not quite
so pretty one in the afternoons. The sushi really was good. As was the sake.
For four days, we went there every day. We scanned the surroundings and tried to think, feel and see like the glasses man.
‘What do you think, Hirsch,’ I asked as
I put a piece of tekka maki in my mouth, ‘what motivates our glasses devil?’
Hirsch pondered the question, took a sip of his sake, and spoke. ‘I believe that he lost something long ago. The glasses don’t seem all that important to me here. He is not looking for the largest, most beautiful or most expensive pair. He is looking for the one that will give him something back. A feeling, a taste, a memory. Like somebody who is searching for his name. That is why he is above all attracted by lonely people.’
‘Nicely put!’
‘Thank you!’
I sounds funny, but slowly we started
liking the glasses man. Perhaps he was, in spite of all the misery he had caused, not a completely bad guy. He walked the streets alone, in search of truth. He was a hero of our time, a last Romantic. Sometimes the key to the world’s secret lies with people
like him. We are all looking a little for our own view, and not everybody finds it.

Suddenly, I got very cold, colder than ever before. It felt as if a strange hand were creeping into me and grabbed my innermost part. I looked around. On my right and left were only people who seemed occupied with themselves. On the other side
of the sushi counter was an empty chair,
in front of it a beer glass, emptied, and an empty sushi board, with no ginger left.
‘Wasn’t somebody sitting there just now?’
‘I thought so too’, said Hirsch and rubbed his neck as if he had just been strangled.
He really looked a little pale. We called for the waitress. Just then a scream could be heard from the direction of the platform that tightened everybody throats.
Whoever you may be, poor thing, I only thought – watch out for your glasses!