Please introduce yourself—what is your name, where are you from, what do you do?
Hello, I am Torsten Schumann, I am from Germany, live in Chengdu (China) and Berlin and work as a photo artist.
What is your relationship with photography, and how did you get into it?
Photography helps me in my everyday life to question my environment in a curious and playful way. The more I do this, the more I understand the world full of riddles.
During my engineering studies at the time, I sought a balance to the dry subject matter in art and attended workshops in various media such as lithography, painting, screen printing, etching and b/w photography development.
In the end, I discovered that it´s photography which gives me the most pleasure, because it best suits my nature. Probably because I can easily integrate it into my everyday life and it gives legitimacy to my small everyday observations, curiosity and urge to play.
So it was through the darkroom that I got into photography. Even then, I found photography on the street the most fascinating.
What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?
My approach to photography is highly intuitive, because I do not set myself any themes in advance. I photograph in everyday life in a variety of settings from different perspectives and in various light—in other words, very diverse motifs.
I am driven by spontaneous fascination, which seems to come from deep within my subconscious and cannot be planned. The trigger is usually a resonance of my inner mood with the environment, which makes me feel a certain enthusiasm.
Mostly this occurs when I don't understand what fascinates me so much or when the sceneries irritate me. The subsequent editing is then, despite intuition, additionally analytical. Based on the intuitively created images, certain areas of interest and cross connections crystallize, which then lead to a coherent photographic body of work.
What is the story you want your pictures to tell?
I like to ask questions with my pictures. Questions about the little things and wonders, about us, how we live in the city and how it can be part of larger contexts. Above all, I want to show my personal view of the street, which is always designed by people and is a seemingly endless Wunderkammer.
It's actually like a fairy tale, except that you don't always know whether to smile or cry. Or both at the same time.
Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?
For my work I like vibrant, complex and international cities with lots of contrasts. But also a beautiful light is important to me. I like sunshine, which is even clearer with a little wind. So, it´s usually a metropolis near the sea. Istanbul is such a city. In China, it is perhaps Guangzhou, among others.
What is your personal relationship to cities, and how do you perceive them as places in general?
As it is the forest and the park for the squirrel, it is the cities for me. Maybe because I was born in a Chinese year of the rabbit, but not in the forest, and because I like to roam around. With my Wunderkammer observations, I then feed the bunny, or my inner squirrel.
Regarding your project Vermilion Confusion: what was your intention, and how did you come up with the idea?
With my Chinese wife living in China, I continued my photographic work as usual, but in China. Without a concrete theme, many images continued to emerge intuitively, from which the project Vermilion Confusion emerged in a long editing process.
Suddenly living in a foreign culture is like a cultureclash. That's why the images collide seamlessly, as in Wolfgang Zurborn's book draft for this body of work. I often ask myself what kind of reality I live in. Is this real? I can better convey this somewhat confusing feeling through the complexity of the double-image montages.
At the same time, I play with this confusion and thus question whether photography depicts reality.
Which project did you never finish?
Normally I always work continuously and something develops out of it. Because I don't work in projects, at least initially, it's hard for me to answer that question.
However, I think of my monochrome series Off Keel, which I actually created at the same time as my book More Cars, Clothes and Cabbages as an independent body of work. This led up to the physical, self-bound book dummy, nominated for the UNSEEN Amsterdam dummy award. However, I have not yet published it in a book.
What is that one thing you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?
During my student days and beyond, I played Santa Claus to 6 to 9 families on Christmas Eve for at least 7 years in a row. So I was received by the most diverse families in their living rooms and actually had more authority than the kids parents.
Nevertheless, I did not dare to ask the families in each case for a group photo, which would have resulted in a total of certainly 50 photographs of festively dressed very diverse families in their decorated parlors.
If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?
I would tell my younger self: Be brave, follow your heart and critically question what others advise you. Only listen to others if it helps you in some way to follow your dreams. Trust yourself. You don't have to please anyone else in your life. And to my older self, I would advise that he give this advice to the younger self as early as possible.
What do you prefer saying: «to take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?
Of course, a photograph anyway tells at least as much about its author as about the memento or period of reality. But still it is for me the moment inspired by reality, in which I intuitively «take» a photo. Only when editing I «make» through the sum of intuitive and analytical decisions from it an image that endures for me.
What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?
It was when objects already completely confused me when I was photographing them. I photographed a plastic artificial flower in an abandoned shop window, which has already lost some plastic leaves and petals due to the glaring sunlight over the years, because the glue could not withstand the heat over the years.
3 minutes later, I was astonished to find that this flower was now suddenly standing there naked, surrounded by its plastic petals and leaves lying on the ground. It took me quite a while to realize that there were 2 shop windows, each with a plastic flower.
If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?
Sculpting interests me very much. The way I look at the world and photograph it, things often develop their own life through their often sculptural character.
How would you describe one of your pictures to a blind person?
That's when I like to listen to how others see and describe my work, such as here Wolfgang Zurborn:
«With a subtle humor, objects and sceneries found in everyday life are put into the picture with unusual perspectives in such a way that they give a very vivid expression to the paradoxes and absurdities of contemporary life.
In pairs of images directly joined together, the fragmentary glimpses of urban life condense into highly complex pictorial montages. The photographic imagery is borne of an empathetic curiosity for the particular in the unspectacular and the everyday and dissolves the boundary between appearance and reality, evoking a healthy skepticism toward the supposed evidentiary functions of the medium of photography.»
What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?
I'm still at Vermilion Confusion. And let's see where life takes me and thus also my work.
Thank you, Torsten!
At the same time, I play with this confusion and thus question whether photography depicts reality.
Which project did you never finish?
Normally I always work continuously and something develops out of it. Because I don't work in projects, at least initially, it's hard for me to answer that question.
However, I think of my monochrome series Off Keel, which I actually created at the same time as my book More Cars, Clothes and Cabbages as an independent body of work. This led up to the physical, self-bound book dummy, nominated for the UNSEEN Amsterdam dummy award. However, I have not yet published it in a book.
What is that one thing you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?
During my student days and beyond, I played Santa Claus to 6 to 9 families on Christmas Eve for at least 7 years in a row. So I was received by the most diverse families in their living rooms and actually had more authority than the kids parents.
Nevertheless, I did not dare to ask the families in each case for a group photo, which would have resulted in a total of certainly 50 photographs of festively dressed very diverse families in their decorated parlors.
If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?
I would tell my younger self: Be brave, follow your heart and critically question what others advise you. Only listen to others if it helps you in some way to follow your dreams. Trust yourself. You don't have to please anyone else in your life. And to my older self, I would advise that he give this advice to the younger self as early as possible.
What do you prefer saying: «to take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?
Of course, a photograph anyway tells at least as much about its author as about the memento or period of reality. But still it is for me the moment inspired by reality, in which I intuitively «take» a photo. Only when editing I «make» through the sum of intuitive and analytical decisions from it an image that endures for me.
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