Yes, it’s my first time in Pakistan.

 

I like Pakistan very much and what I like has more to do with how I see people getting along with each other than with what they get along with. Pakistan is very chaotic and chaos is the future. If I get back to Germany, I’ll die of boredom.

 

Absolutely. Karachi is chaotic, but I have a feeling that this is a kind of future global thing. Pakistanis learn very well how to cope and get along with chaos, and I admire the people for their getting along.

 

I don’t remember. I was very young, twelve years or so. I wanted to become a pilot, but then I realized that I couldn’t become a pilot because I had a problem with my back. So, I decided to become a photographer.

 

I don’t remember why. I found it interesting to work with technical things and I had an affection for pictures and framing, but I don’t exactly remember this.

 

I started photographing with my family, flowers in the garden, dogs, miniature trains and things like that.

 

Peter Bömmels, the brainchild behind Spex – now a successful painter and an art professor – was my neighbor. He was working in a kindergarten and was studying social pedagogy. One day he approached me and said: “What do you think about making a magazine? Let’s get some people on board.” We gathered in a bar, talked it over and so it began.

 

I could work on stuff I was interested in like music and aspects pertaining to culture and youth, but mainly music.

 

Yes, the main idea was to create a different magazine because the popular magazines stuck to hippie and rock and at the time punk and new wave came up. Punk was totally different, but there was no forum or magazine. So, that was the idea.

 

Yes, the idea was to have a special outlook on things, but the title also had to do with a new wave band called X-Ray Spex – the idea of an X-ray specs which allowed an individual to see through and behind things.

 

Absolutely, it was about seeing things differently. We were not working on seeing things differently, we just saw things differently and wanted to create a forum.

 

It was an analog process. Making an analog magazine meant that texts had to be written and photographs had to be developed. The texts and photographs were then printed out and glued together according to layout and templates for ads. These collages were then reproduced photographically and transferred to a printing machine. The printing process was totally analog.

 

The distribution process is the same, but the production process is totally different. Today, you have a digital workflow which is totally different from an analog workflow.

The black and white prints were cheaper and I could easily produce them myself. I had a dark room where I produced all the photographs firsthand. It was cheap to process black and white prints. I developed films, produced prints and put them on paper; I could control the technical process myself. The colored prints were very complicated and involved a lot of chemical workout, whereas the black and white prints were much easier to handle.

 

Before the 1980s, I was a student and was not working as a professional photographer. I did music photography for a small record label. I took cover photographs for singers and bands signed by unpopular small record labels. So, I was already a bit in contact with music. Spex was more or less my first professional job. I came to music through Spex because we were writing about music; I was twenty-four and very much into music. I would listen to music all day long from morning till evening. So, the music connection was just there.

 

The first thing I had in mind was to take a photograph that was printable and interesting. In terms of product, to produce a product that was usable, but I wanted to have a unique photograph unlike other photographs.

The influence has always been the same. You have to learn the techniques and handle them. I personalized the techniques. Whether analog or digital, I have my personal way to use the techniques. I don’t do it on a general basis or how it is done in brackets. I explored the techniques my way by looking at how I could handle them myself.

 

It’s hard to say. I always had a big problem with studying engineering because I saw it was not what I really wanted (laughs). I was very happy to work creatively.

 

 

Yes, it’s about photography, but photographic engineering means that you work for the photographic industry which at the time comprised both the chemical industry and the optical industry. Today, what is left of the photographic industry is the optical industry. The rest has disappeared. So, what I studied in a way is like the steam machine techniques. I’m a steam machine engineer (laughs).

 

Yes and no. The genre I’m into – music photography – has changed a lot because of how the society has changed. The outlook on media and the consciousness of media has totally changed. In the early 80s, people had another conscience pertaining to media existence. Today, media existence has fully grabbed the people and their perception. This is the difference. For example, you can’t go to a concert and just take photographs because someone can come and tell you that photographing is not allowed.

 

That’s also true, of course. Anyway, at the time, you could take photographs and noone would give a damn. Today, you can do the first three pieces of music, take photographs from the ditch in front of the stage at big concerts. This didn’t exist before. Also, the managing department of artists wants to control the media image of their artists. This has also changed. Back then, the artists were contacted by other artists. These artists were journalists and photographers and so on, but not media workers. Today, journalists and musicians are media workers. This is the difference.

 

No, I don’t miss them.

 

(laughs) Yeah, right. But I’m very happy that they are part of my history. I’m a half-and-half person. I’m half analog and half digital. This gives me a very nice possibility of combining things. When I see a digital product, I can remember the analog product. I have another relation to it … another understanding of what might be an image or a sound or a light or whatever. This is a very big field and I could talk a lot about it. I think you are studying it here and this is something you as media students should really be aware of.

I have no preferences here. I don’t want to decide between the two. And I don’t have to.

 

Exactly. It’s about options. Digital is good because it’s so fast and you can come to your aim very fast. Analog is good because you can create more unique things like a painting for example. Maybe that’s not a very good aspect, but as I’m very lazy, I like digital very much because you can do it with one hand.

 

This is something I always had difficulties with, but the more I think about it the more I see myself as an artist. I see the reception of my images … people think I’m an artist. So, I started to think about it. I never wanted to become an artist. It is more easy to work on contract because when you work on contract you don’t have this responsibility of being an artist. Being an artist is very difficult – and is more and more fading away. As an artist, you always have to fight. Being a contract photographer is easier. You have a contract. You have a task. You fulfill the task. You have an aim and you do what has to be done. Maybe this was what I liked to do, but when I look back now, I see that I worked like an artist.

 

Because things started to become repetitive and I was no more that interested. I was there in a parking house taking photographs of a band with concrete walls. They were so boring. They were standing there and I thought this is so boring. I knew it all. At the same time, I was in contact with a car-building company and I started working for them as a documentary photographer. I found it very interesting to see what is there outside the cultural area.

 

I would see it the other way around. It’s so tense and so dense that it is a challenge to take photographs here. When the guys of We Are One (a Pakistani dance group, SJ) took me to Lyari, it was like I was in a punk rock concert. I love this kind of tension. Karachi is very fast. So you have to understand very fast. You have to act very fast. You have to look around. You have to look straight and when you look straight you also have to look both to the right and to the left. This is what you could call my work ethos – to be very aware. You have to be very aware to survive here and a place like Lyari is the center of being really strong to survive. This energy is inspiring, it stimulates me very much.

 

But again, how can one avoid the exotic clichés? You told me that you consciously decided against taking certain kind of photographs. You stopped yourself: No, just don’t do it. 

Yes, I thought about this a lot. When I see a man who’s lying in the dirt or a beggar with no legs, I don’t take my camera out because I don’t want this. I want to understand. I don’t want to reproduce some kind of surface of a western image of oriental existence. I want to show the things like they are. And that means I have to understand. It is a challenge to understand, because it’s hard to understand. So, I have to focus. I have to be open. I have to be quick. I had all of this with my old kind of photography – my preferred kind of work. So, the tension here is good for me, but I don’t think it’s good for the Pakistanis. I wish that they could get off this tension and could live a relaxed and happy life with an outlook to the future.

 

Yes, but it also has become a cliché, an image of an image if you like. I don’t want to show the beggar as a cliché, but as an individual, as a special person. Everyone is special. This is the task that everybody who reflects others – be it in a portrait be it in a writing be it in whatever – has to do. They have to go deep into the other side and empathize. That’s very important.

 

Why won’t you take pictures of the man lying in the dirt or the beggar with no legs?

As I said, because it’s a cliché – and moreover, it is disrespectful. I’m not looking for that. This is social peeping and I hate social peeping. Social peeping is very common and people like it very much. You see drug dealers and heroin addicts in their blood and all this. This is disgusting and is a kind of peeping that I really hate. I don’t like that. I have heard that in Pakistan there are very popular crime magazines who love to show this. This is something I find really disgusting. It also destroys social interference.

 

I guess that was my session with Can, a German band from Cologne, my hometown. They were very famous in the 70s. Many musicians in the 80s related to them or still do today. As far as I remember, I was called to take a photograph of them. So I arrived at their studio – and they told me that they didn’t want to stand together and I had to figure out a way to manage a photograph. They were all running around in the studio and talking. It was a reunion and those were the worst photographs I ever took.

 

Because I was not allowed to grab a situation. They didn’t want to work with me. They wanted to work with me, but at the same time they didn’t want to work with me, too. They wanted me there, but they didn’t want to work with me.

 

They didn’t want to pose in any case … They just wanted some casual photographs while talking with each other.

 

Well, they were not. They were really bad.

 

No idea. Maybe I was too nervous or maybe I felt like I was not accepted.

The situation I guess. I want to be there. But I only know if I was afterwards.

 

Well, some of them actually did, but then they only presented the safe ones to us. They thought the risky ones weren’t good enough. So, this is about a certain idea of perfection that is in our heads – an idea that is being reproduced by the mass media. But it’s the imperfection if you like that is more interesting. A perfect photograph doesn’t challenge you – it doesn’t ask you to work with it. You look at it, admire it, but you don’t reflect. What I am looking for isn’t beauty if you like. I want to make an interesting picture. It may sound banal, but that’s it basically – creating something interesting. Not to compose something very carefully, to control the situation, but to let things compose themselves.  I can’t explain it. I can’t give a recipe.

 

Interview: Saima Jawed

Additional photos: Markus Heidingsfelder