WHAT I SEE

Excerpts from my Conversation with Aaron Schuman in February 2025

 

It started quite early, when I was around thirteen. Actually, I had two influences. My father was an enthusiastic photographer in the sense of family and travel photography; it was purely a hobby for him, but photography was always around, and for us kids it was of course exciting to see what he was doing. The other influence was at my high school, where they hosted a photo club. They set up a darkroom, taught us how to develop our own film, and how to make our own prints, which made all the difference…

…As a teenager you start to think about who you are, what interests you, and what you want to be. I was running around with a camera quite a lot—experimenting with myself and finding out what I was looking for. Really, I was learning “what I see”…

…When I went to university, I put myself under a lot of pressure to succeed academically, and I lost photography a little bit. Later, it was sidelined, because I wanted to do well professionally. Photography was still with me through all those years, but I was using it like my dad, for the family album and on vacation. I wanted to make “good” pictures, but I didn’t have any artistic purpose or meaning. I didn’t feel like an artist, and didn’t allow myself to be one. In my work I was a rational, structural, thinking person, and I kept my emotions controlled. In hindsight, I always felt that if I could choose again, I might have pursued a career in photography…

…I studied economics in Munich, went to Cambridge to do my Masters, and then returned to Munich to do a PhD. Eventually, I joined a reinsurance company. I wanted to work internationally, so it was a good place to be. I spent my entire professional life there, for nearly thirty years, and made a career of it. Not that I particularly enjoyed it. Then in 2013, when I was in my late fifties, there was an opportunity to quit. I decided to do so, for two reasons really—to get off the treadmill and have more time with my wife, and to return to photography, finally…

…In previous years, the reason that I pressed the shutter was very simple: it was to remember. I have a poor memory. My wife tells me stories about my life that I don’t remember, so she’s my memory bank. But quite frankly, for me my pictures are a memory bank too. Of course, when you want to take photography seriously, you must have other reasons to make pictures beyond recording memories. And for me, those became the most exciting questions: what’s important to me, how do I look at things, what do I want to tell? These were and continue to be the questions in the back of my mind when I pick up my camera. Much more than during the earlier part of my life, photography has forced me to ask who am I, what’s my perspective on the world, and what do I have to say?…

…In the beginning of this new adventure, I wanted to take pictures that were as objective as possible. I deliberately didn’t want to show any emotions, thinking that reality was strong enough; I didn’t need to do anything else. Of course I had feelings about it, but I tried to keep my feelings out of the pictures. As I developed in these last ten years, I gradually moved away from this approach, focusing not on what reality looks like, but how I feel about it—responding to my environment from a personal perspective

…In my professional career, I was entirely driven by a rational mindset. So at first, I approached photography by sitting down at my desk and trying to do some creative thinking. But I quickly realized that I always got stuck if I approached it analytically. I gradually learnt that I cannot rationally decide on what I’m going to photograph before I go out to make photographs. In the end, my approach became to simply go out and follow my intuition. I have to put my rationality aside—tap into my gut feelings…

…I’m not a great reader or a listener of music, but I’ve always loved pictures, and when it comes to my memories it’s all images. I realize only now that I’ve always been an “Augenmensch”—a German word for a visual person, that doesn’t really have an equivalent translation in English…

…I am often drawn to young people. One reason that I think I find them interesting is because their lives are still ahead of them. They are still in a phase of life where everything is possible. I think that young people spark my imagination about what life will still bring them, and what course in life they might take. Also, I’m always surprised by how young people are so much more open to me when I approach them as a photographer. They’re much more likely to say, “why not?”, and are still in an experimental stage, and willing to be open to new experiences. I’m fascinated by how their openness, their insecurity, and their self-assuredness are visible all at once. In a sense I envy young people. They reflect so much about the human condition and hold all of the potential for life to be experienced within them. When I look at people my age, including myself, I tend to only see fully shaped characters. When I encounter young people from my perspective today, I reflect on when I was young myself, and how I once looked at life…

…To be honest, throughout all the years of making this work, I was mostly focused on “projects.” I started with projects that were more documentary-like, neutral, and distanced in nature. Then, over time, I came closer to doing projects that were less about the subject matter, and much more about myself and my perspective…

…There’s definitely no message here; I am not trying to provide any answers or sense of certainty. Instead, my hope is that these pictures are mysterious enough in an interesting way that you stay with them. In the end, only questions are spurred. And these questions are different for different people. In fact, my pictures don’t even answer many of the questions that I have about myself. But they do provide a sense of what kind of animal this photographer is; again, “what I see.”