Sometimes a work doesn\u2019t just come from an idea, but from a memory that has been quietly waiting in the background for years.<\/p>\n\n
The story behind this piece begins long before I ever worked with slit-scan photography. In 1994 I was travelling through Texas. It was late at night when we pulled off the road near the turnoff to Big Bend National Park, tired and just looking for a place to sleep. There was no hotel lobby in the classic sense, just a small reception hut that felt more like a snack stand with a door. <\/p>\n\n
An older man, the owner of the motel, was sitting behind the counter. As soon as he realised we were German, his face lit up. Without disappearing anywhere, he simply reached under the counter and placed three thick, slightly worn photo albums on the table in front of us, clearly well used and always within reach. Inside were photographs of Wim Wenders, Nastassja Kinski, Harry Dean Stanton and the entire film crew of \u201cParis, Texas\u201d. <\/p>\n\n
A scene from the film, he explained with visible pride, had been shot right there, in his motel. We leafed through the albums: set photos, behind-the-scenes moments, handwritten notes, and images of the rooms we were about to sleep in. As a kind of reward for our interest in his story, he gave us the room where, as he assured us, one of the scenes with Kinski and Stanton had been filmed. Whether every detail was true or not almost didn\u2019t matter \u2013 the atmosphere of the place made it entirely believable. <\/p>\n\n
The next morning, when I woke up and pulled back the curtains, there was literally nothing outside. Just empty land, a strip of road \u2013 and a single tumbleweed rolling across the dry, sunburnt ground, like in so many Hollywood films. It felt like standing inside a frame that could have come straight from the movie itself. <\/p>\n\n
Years later, when I created this slit-scan work, that memory came back almost immediately. The stretched lines of colour, the deep blues and moving red echoes reminded me of that night and of the film at the same time. The piece is not an illustration of \u201cParis, Texas\u201d, and it doesn\u2019t try to retell the story. But for me, it carries the feeling of that journey: distance and intimacy, emptiness and connection, the long and sometimes winding roads between places and people. <\/p>\n\n
“Paris, Texas” is part of my ongoing series “Space over Time”, in which movement, light and duration are condensed into images that capture not just how something looks, but how it feels over time. In this work, that feeling is tied to a film, a motel in the middle of the night, and a quietly glowing gas station somewhere in West Texas \u2013 and to a tumbleweed rolling past our window the next morning. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes a work doesn\u2019t just come from an idea, but from a memory that has been quietly waiting in the background for years. The story behind this piece begins long before I ever worked with slit-scan photography. In 1994 I was travelling through Texas. It was late at night when we pulled off the road […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1419,1420],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-words-about-the-work","category-behind-the-scenes"],"yoast_head":"\n