The images were taken in Berlin between 2011 and 2025 and explore the experience of being on the move in an urban environment: What drives people? Where are they headed? And what does it feel like to be in this city?
Being on the move is a state of in-between—between start and finish, departure and arrival. The city becomes a space of freedom: anonymous, self-determined, a place where one is left to one’s own devices. At the same time, it is a visual cosmos, a stream of fragments that line up like letters or snippets of words and blur into a personal soundtrack of everyday life.
Franz Hessel describes strolling through the city as “a kind of reading of the street, in which people’s faces, displays, shop windows, café terraces, trains, cars, and trees become letters of equal standing, which together form words, sentences, and pages of an ever-changing book.” It is these fleeting moments and their condensation into a distinct visual world that interest me in this work.