Series
"A maximum of seven images are shown per series. I work with this limitation to better meet my own demands for a constantly questioning approach to my work. I also want to do my part to stem the flood of images."
Till Heene, July 2025
Peope in transit
"People in Transit is based on photographs I take at airports, mostly at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Its architect, Paul Andreu, created wonderful architectural sculptures. The traces of the 1970s, or rather the consequences of a 'function follows form' approach in the French style, do add up today as an additional stress factor for travelers. But if you go to this airport without the intention of traveling anywhere, you can have a truly wonderful time there. At airports, we rush through a more or less large window of time between arrival and departure. Just like in real life. I look at the people there. I watch them. I photograph their haste, their brief stays, sometimes their fleeting encounters. From the concrete necessity of making real people unrecognizable, I gain the great freedom to create the images in a completely different way. The images quite obviously show from the outset that they are lying. I find that very honest."
People in the river
"People in the River originated from images of river swimmers seeking refreshment in the summer and letting themselves drift downstream. Water and light are the defining elements; blue and yellow their corresponding colors.
All that's missing is Heraclitus and his theory of rivers. Or perhaps someone else? In the peaceful pastime of this summer refreshment, Albert Schweitzer comes to mind:
"I am life that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live.
Till Heene, September 2025
The old cellphone
"The old cell phone is based on pictures I took over twenty years ago with one of the first camera phones. I rediscovered the phone a few months ago in a drawer, charged it, and lo and behold! Suddenly, all the people I knew back then, some of whom I was friends with, reappeared. I painstakingly recovered their images from the coarsely pixelated display and edited them. They will be printed on beautiful Japanese handmade paper so they will now be more comfortable than before in the dark drawer.
I believe that it can be a question of artistic design to opt out of the race for ever-higher resolution and to engage more deeply with the stages of transition. In my understanding, this is not nostalgia, but a refusal to adapt artistic work to the ever-shortening product life cycles and the obsolescence of the digital tools I use. I draw a parallel to the work of the Pictorialists at the beginning of the 20th century, who already staged photographs like paintings. Or why not also to the work of Pointillists, who pixelated their paintings somewhat earlier than the Pictorialists - today one would say: pixelating by using the means of painting."
Till Heene, June 2025
Robert Walser, or: The melting point
"Has any poet ever succeeded as well as the Swiss Robert Walser (1878-1956) in quoting a character from his own work even in death?
'I have no time,' Simon said quietly to himself, 'I must hurry to reach the next town, otherwise I wouldn't feel any anxiety about lingering any longer with this poor fellow of a dead man, who was a poet and a dreamer. How nobly he chose his grave. He lies amidst magnificent, green, snow-covered fir trees. I won't report it to anyone. Nature looks down on her dead man, the stars sing softly above him, and the night birds warble—that's the best music for someone who has lost both hearing and feeling.'
This was written, rather romantically morbid, by the twenty-eight-year-old Robert Walser in his novel The Tanner Siblings. Fifty years later, on Christmas Day, he himself lay, struck down by a heart attack, in the snow near Herisau in the canton of Appenzell. Two farm boys find the body; an unnamed police photographer takes the last picture.
Arnold Odermatt could not have staged the traces of the tragedy better.
An appropriation of this image resulted in a work that was shown as part of a group exhibition in October 2024 at the Galerie Leupin in Basel. It is a tetraptych that takes up the poet's last image, liberates it from its sober, documentary black and white, and playfully continues it.
Till Heene, October 2024