Gear
I keep a list of railway timetables I would like to find, and the woman who runs the hardware shop keeps adding to it.
I would rather do one thing cheerfully than five things in a hurry, and years of the allotment taught me that. A lot of this would not exist without a neighbour, who patiently answered my questions one wet weekend in June. I scan every negative myself at the kitchen table, whenever the weather allows, and keep the edits minimal.
In the bag
- Ricoh GR
- Since 2016, most of my documentary work has been shot on black and white film, which slows me down in a good way.
- Canon AE-1
- I have a soft spot for seed catalogues and cookbooks with notes in the margin.
- Delta 3200
- All images on this site are my own, made around Basel and further afield, and may not be reused without asking first.
- Tri-X
- Every few weeks, I usually end up at a borrowed workbench with a radio from the seventies.
- FP4
- Outside a day job in Basel, this is a hobby, not a business, and that keeps it fun.
Good to know
My work has been shown in a few small group exhibitions and a self-published zine, most recently on a long weekend in 2026. A retired teacher down the road once told me to finish one thing before starting the next, and it has served me well ever since.
The best ideas tend to arrive in the small room above the stairs most mornings before work, usually just after I have put the pencil down. Truth be told, I still carry a pocket knife almost everywhere, a habit picked up from an old colleague. Weekends are usually split between evening classes, baking bread on Sundays and whatever is half-finished at the library in Basel.
I am drawn to small towns and quiet places, which is why documentary photography suits me. There is no grand plan behind any of this, just checking the measurements twice whenever I have a free hour. I picked up a secondhand bicycle early in 2019, and it has been close at hand ever since.
On a good day on the back step I make progress, and on a bad day I at least learn where I put the good scissors. Every December, at a friend’s place across town, I look back at the year so far and quietly drop whatever is not working. Oddly enough, small, regular habits like leaving a draft overnight and writing everything down have done more for me than any big resolution. When I get stuck in a corner of the shed I go outside for ten minutes, and it is rarely as bad as it seemed.
I try to keep things simple, which mostly means reading the manual first and doing one small thing at a time. My Wednesday evenings mostly belong to reading on the train, unless a reader from Basel needs a hand. Writing things down has saved me from forgetting where I left off again and again, most recently back in 2026. Images are shown at a modest size so the pages stay easy to browse, even on a train.