Interview • 107 PH

Johannes Döppler, Danijel Sijakovic, Roman Paul Widera, an den Rändern

Mainz, Germany

Please introduce yourself: What is your name, where are you from, what do you do?

JD: I’m Johannes Döppler, I work as an artist/freelance photographer, I studied at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.

DS: My name is Danijel Sijakovic, I study Fine Arts at the Kunsthochschule Mainz in the Filmclass of John Skoog. This year I’ll graduate.

RPW: I’m Roman Paul Widera. I studied art history and film studies and also in the class of John. I work with text, mostly poetry, which I publish and exhibit.

JD, DS, RPW: We all live and work in Mainz.

What is your relationship with photography, and how did you get into it?

DS: I was interested in art in my youth and when visiting exhibitions I realized I was always drawn to photography. Seeing works by Viktor Kolář in Prague then sparked my interest in making artworks myself and I quickly applied for art school after that.

JD: I have a background in drawing and started using photography just for documentary reasons and then realized the potential of the medium, which to me is so different from drawing. Compared to other media, photography claims to have a high credibility and has a very distinct way of communicating reality, and that mainly formed my interest in the medium.

RPW: While I primarily write, I sometimes seek to maintain «photographic» or at least an «image-making» approach in conceiving a text. Since my writing is much more informed and influenced by visual arts, photography and cinema especially, than it is by literature, my texts are always haunted by images.

What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?

DS: Sometimes a ‹Motiv› really jumps up at me and excites me immediately.

JD: Yes, that is a very special mood while photographing, and it works more intuitive.

DS: But when working on a series, there definitely is a certain planned framework you‘re moving through—but then there is also always the possibility of something exciting that was not foreseeable before and leaves room to change the direction of an image or even a whole project.

RPW: It definetly is an alternating process of both. With writing it is not too different: I often have a single thought at the core of a text, that serves as a starting-point, and those come very abruptly. Then the transfer of a thought or acute idea into text can be more planned, because it forms itself line by line but then every line can also end up in a detour, so it always has to maintain a balance between vague and concrete.

What is the story you want your pictures to tell?

DS: I think I’m more concerned with atmosphere in photography than with story in the strict sense of the word.

RPW: Yes, I also tend to think of my poems as some kind of mood pieces—at times they tell stories, mostly microscopic ones, but atmosphere has a higher priority. And sometimes a story only forms itself during the arrangement of different works that didn’t necessarily have a narrative approach.

JD: That is the nice thing about books with photographs as well as collections of poems. You automatically tie them together and they hopefully create an overarching story or theme, but also can be viewed and read on their own, they always are solitary and a part of a bigger picture simultaneously.

Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?

DS: For me it’s Tokyo. A lifetime probably isn’t enough to approach this place adaquately with a camera. It also is such a mythic city for photography, but still due to its enourmous size, you’ll always be able to find ways to reveal something in a new way.

RPW: Staying with asian megacities, Hong Kong for me, no hesitation. That stems from the cinematic influence on my work, because the melodramatic cinema of Hong Kong, especially in the 1980s/90s, impacted me the most. It articulates merely implicit, as I have rarely worked directly with this city in my writing. That certainly would change with a visit, especially since my knowledge of HK is vastly filtered through media, so it probably would create a tension between the actual place and the images of it I idolize.

JD: In the past I realized that the most interesting things come up where you least expect them—so I try to get out of the habit to put certain places on my agenda.

What is your personal relationship to cities, and how do you perceive them as places in general?

DS, JD: That is a question for Roman.

RPW: I have to think about Manhattan, the film. Somebody says about the character Woody Allen plays that «he can't function anywhere else» (than New York, in that case). I always found that choice of words very funny but accurate, «functioning», which sounds so machine-like. I think sometimes this is what a big city can do to you, it makes you «function» in a certain way, because it has its own rules and mechanics that don't bow down and you have to adapt to that. Or you cannot adapt to it at all, which creates a friction that can also hold potential.

Regarding your project an den Rändern: What was your intention, and how did you come up with the idea?

DS, JD, RPW: We wanted to bring our positions together and see what would happen and also experiment with relationships of text and image with photographic approaches. In the strange times of 2020/21 we saw ourselves drawn to places that felt sort of «unaffected» by the current time, in a way these buildings and sites stood there solid and untouchable—they almost didn’t care. The places gave the framework and we approached them very intuitively, so in the end it was a lot of material to chose from. Working on the book, with the help of our designer Julian Lehman, was our way of concentrating everything we gathered into one coherent work.

The book format was set from the beginning and from that on we also looked for interesting ways to present it, the book as an object itself but also the works in it. For example, when we launched the book, we built a special wooden display to present the first print run and then projected text and images onto its rough surface. This was also a way to transform what we tried to achieve in the book into another format with a varied outcome, we recombined the photos and poems in a new way to create different meaning—and also to keep it vital even beyond the finished publication.

Which project did you never finish?

DS, JD, RPW: You probably discard things all the time for many reasons. Doesn’t mean you cannot pick them up again someday.

What is that one thing you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?

DS: My hometown Osijek in Croatia changed dramatically since my childhood.

JD: Yeah. In my hometown it's the same thing—I even started to try capturing the atmosphere as I remembered it once and stopped because it changed so much that I couldn’t find it anymore.

If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?

DS: I’d jump back ten years and tell my younger self: «Buy that Mamiya 7 now!»

What do you prefer saying: «to take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?

DS, JD, RPW: It’s always both, leaning towards one end or the other with each picture.

What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?

RPW: I once took a tour through a steel mill and brought my camera. And there was what I thought to be one of those perfect moments, smoke and sunlight that glared through the ceiling creating a very beautiful and thick ray like a curtain, I was deeply fascinated. But that is not what was really interesting about the experience, it was the reaction of the guy who gave me the tour. Because he was like «Yeah big deal, I see that everyday.» That stuck with me, this discrepance of me thinking to witness an almost ‹sacral› moment, because I was an alien in that place, and then this no-bullshit-guy who really knows his stuff, he saw the same thing and thought nothing of it. Didn't even bother to take out his own camera.

If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?

DS: I’d probably invest myself in filmmaking.

JD: I think I’d definetely spend more time working with sound.

RPW: If I could pick something to be ‹good› at it’d be painting.

How would you describe one of your pictures to a blind person?

DS: I’d probably give a photo of mine to Roman and let him make a poem out of it.

RPW: If I did that, then I’d give you a poem of mine and you‘d have to do a photo based on it.

DS: And thinking about it, I’d also would recommend Werner Herzogs Land of Silence and Darkness to anyone who works visually and was ever concerned with this question.

What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?

DS: I’m currently working on a series about the Western films that were shot in former Yugoslavia and grew hugely popular in Germany. I’m interested in the relationship between the mythos of the American West and the various ways it translated to Europe and formed our idea of it. Roman and I will collaborate again for this project.

RPW: The ominous ‹novel› of course, the one you always «are currently working on» but never really, because the quick and spontaneous projects are more fun.

Thank you, Johannes, Danijel, and Roman!

Editorial Note:

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Photography: Johannes Döppler, Danijel Sijakovic
Text: Roman Paul Widera

Links: Johannes Döppler: Website, Instagram • Danijel Sijakovic: Website, Instagram • Roman Paul Widera: Website, Instagram

Mainz, Germany

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