Apologies for the low image quality, the event organizer accidentally saved the images as low res jpegs.

I’ve always been interested in human behavior - why we do the things we do, what triggers certain decisions etc. Unfortunately for me, I have the concentration span of a five-year-old so going to college to study behavioral psychology was never my thing.

Instead, I began using my camera and eventually technology to document patterns that I found peculiar, funny, strange, and interesting. I did a talk at Fotografiska NYC about how I use photography and technology to create awareness around our strange human behaviors. And tried to answer questions such as:

Why did model homes built for the new middle class in emerging economies all look the same?

Why do most of us only capture images of extraordinary moments when 99.9% of our lives are made up of boring, mundane ordinary moments?

Why do almost all photos on Instagram feel like variations on the same image?

What makes us capture a moment in a certain way?

What will your images look like if there was an app* that prevented you from repeating your previously captured images?

*Turns out there is one.

What’s this? Read the story behind the project here.

Year: July 2010
Location: Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York
Left: Andreas Gehrke photographed by Martin Adolfsson
Right: Martin Adolfsson photographed by Andreas Gehrke

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Year: Oct 2020
Location: Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York
Left: Andreas Gehrke photographed by Martin Adolfsson
Right: Martin Adolfsson photographed by Andreas Gehrke

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Q&A: Andreas Gehrke

How would you describe your work?
muted not loud 

Is there anything you want to shoot more of? 
Everything 

Looking back 10 years, what has changed and what hasn’t changed?
I think the game is the same but it seems to be way easier to start a career, mainly because of the digital revolution in photography and in media. Also, there are a lot more people in the digital world who deal with photography (or images) who have no idea about copyrights or the value of an image.  

What’s the one thing that has surprised you the most in the last decade?
The photography medium is more important and popular than ever but the single image itself is deteriorating in value (and the more we all use Instagram).

Going back to 2009, is there anything in terms of your career you’d have done differently?
Good question … publishing fewer books and do more art shows instead? I don’t know ...

Has your approach to your work/profession changed - if yes, how?
Maybe when I became a father my approach to my work changed unavoidably too, simply because of time management.

Has your approach to your non-professional life changed - if yes, how?
My life definitively changed when my daughter was born ...

What do you know now, that you didn’t at the time you took the last portrait?
I’m afraid I haven’t learned much since then. Haha! 

Has your relationship to photography changed since 2009, if yes, how?
Surprisingly I’m still fascinated simply by a good photo. Doesn’t matter if it’s my own or from a colleague.

Bio:
I was born in 1975 in East Berlin. In 1988, at age 12, I joined a photography club in my neighborhood. The darkroom became my sanctuary during my high-school years when the Wall fell and my hometown suddenly became a different city. Berlin in the mid-1990s was a wasteland in many ways, including the job market, so I moved to Hamburg and became an assistant to a photographer working in advertising, fashion, and portraiture. Aged 24, I began working primarily for magazines taking portraits, and architecture, and landscape photography. 

Parallel to this commissioned work, I constantly worked on my own personal projects. I photographed places whose stories are characterized by deprivation, disorientation, absence, or indeterminacy: empty spaces, wastelands, and edgelands and regions. I enjoy exhibiting my work, but I have always retained a special affection for the photography book – in my eyes, the perfect medium. In 2013, I founded my own publishing house, Drittel Books, to produce my future monographs independently and to build a platform for my artist friends’ work.

While I have taken maybe over 100 portrait commissions for magazines during my career, my personal work features few humans. This is based upon a sense that the power of the environment in which we live – from the world’s most populous cities to its most desolate landscapes – is to reveal who and what we are.

www.noshe.com
www.andreasgehrke.de

The idea that a portrait uncovers something about the person being photographed never really resonated with me. I always felt it was the other way around, the choice of lens, angle, light, and the interaction with the subject was really a reflection of the person behind the camera not the person in front.

In 2010 I began playing with the idea of creating a dual self-portrait project. Over the next two years, I would invite other photographers to my studio to sit as my subject while afterward, I became their subject. The rules were simple - I would photograph all my subjects (the photographers) the exact same way, using the same lens (24-70 mm), the same aperture (f/8), the same light setup (three lights, one large reflector). I even approached the interaction the same way, (focused, and serious). They could photograph me anyway and at any location they wanted.

In 2019 while I was creating a website to collect all my personal work (you’re looking at it right now). I looked through my archive and re-discovered this project, The Portraitist. Some projects don’t age very well but this one felt different, the portraits had become more interesting over time. Not only because of the way I had photographed or been photographed but also because the portraits marked the beginning of events that at the time of capture were still unknown.

Monika Sziladi's portrait of me was captured at a bar where I had invited a girl on our first date (the girl later became my wife). Some of the invited photographers became close friends others I haven’t seen since the portraits were taken.

But what’s perhaps even more interesting, has the extra decade of experience (both professional and personal) changed how they capture their portrait?

See for yourself

Andreas Gehrke 2010/2020