For more than thirty years, I have been photographing people who, at first glance, have hardly anything in common. Actors, prima ballerinas, drag queens, clowns, war veterans, artists, performers, and people on the margins of society. Different countries, different cultures, different biographies. I am interested in people who had the courage to become themselves. People who did not simply adopt their identity, but consciously shaped it. People who carry contradictions within themselves and were willing to pay the price to walk their own path.

I do not photograph them because of their profession, their fame, or their story. I am interested in the moment when all of that recedes into the background and something deeper becomes visible: a human attitude. Photography was never an end in itself to me. It was my passport. It enabled encounters with people and ways of life that I would never have entered without the camera. Every journey, every conversation, and every portrait became part of a larger search. Over the years, an archive of thousands of photographs was created. A body of work that does not consist of individual images, but of the relationships between them. A body of work in which a prima ballerina, a war veteran, and a drag queen can stand side by side because the same human attitude is visible within them. 

I believe that photography is taking on a new purpose in an era of artificial images. It is not technical perfection that makes an image significant, but the encounter from which it emerges. No artificial intelligence can pursue the same question over decades, win people's trust, and slowly allow a coherent world to emerge from all these encounters. That is why I do not photograph people for who they are. But for what becomes visible within them.