fanny and daniel

emma reeves (v and v men photo director) asked me a few question about my child hood:

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in the south of Germany in a tiny village. I remember that we lived in the garden house of a bigger house from a family called Wiedemann. I can't remember much of the house we stayed in but I remember that we had two big trees in the garden one with pears and another with plums. On the plum tree I had a small swing and behind the trees there was a small river in which I once lost my shoe. I stayed most of time just with my mother, as my father was often gone. It gives me a nice feeling if I think about that time. I have very vague memories; most of my memories are about certain smells or sounds and images. Around my 4th birthday we moved to the centre of Munich in a street I like until today very much:" the Klenzestrasse". A Street where a lot was happening.

We had a very small cinema that showed a very nice selection of movies for kids, a very loud but friendly Greek man and his vegetable store, a small clothing store owned by a very fat and extravagant lady who liked to be dressed in glitters and a few gay bars such as the teddy bar that I liked very much as it has a huge bear face on its darkened window.

Secretly I think that this street has been a very big inspiration to me.

Was there someone in your family who lead your interest in photography and film?

My father was a filmmaker and photographer. He committed suicide when I was very, very young, when I was 7. I didn’t really remember much about my father but I found a box when I was 12, a box that my mother had kept for me with old super 8 videos and slides of him. It was my only communication with my father. It made me realize his influences and visions. It gave me a way of communicating with him if I would also follow photography.

Did you have a vivid imagination as a child?

Very much. I was a little isolated and even in the days when my father was around he was difficult to deal with. It was really terrifying. I was not the son that he had an image of. He was very troubled. It was a difficult communication. I had a very strong relationship with my mother and apart from that I was very shy. I played always with nothing. I would be a mad scientist, inventing things!

When we moved to Munich I had a lot of friends but I didn't mind playing alone. I had two important people in my childhood, my mother and my best friend "Fanny" Franziska Roth. Fanny lived in two flats one with her father and one with her mother. The flat of her father was one street away of mine and the flat of her mother two. We were like brother and sister and my mother became hers and hers mine. We loved each other so much that one-day we got married in school. Our teacher organized a ceremony for us where I was wearing a huge hat and Fanny a white dress. In our free time we both escaped to wonderful worlds and we played for hours with nothing more than our imagination. I remember that once we both wanted to invent a flying machine to cross the ocean. We made a lot of drawings and I remember in some we drew a girl from our class hanging on a string from our flying machine and we would fly low over the ocean and feed her to the sharks.

When I got into 5th grade we both went to different schools and with it we stopped dreaming of magical worlds and adventures together.