Photographer

Alexander binder

In our interview, the reticent Stuttgart-based photo artist reveals what influence literature and music, dream and reality have on his abstract works and why the unplanned can often give birth to the most powerful results.

The Sturgheons: First, please tell us a little bit about yourself!

Alexander Binder: I grew up on the edge of the northern Black Forest and have lived and worked in Stuttgart for over 10 years.

With which attributes would you describe your work?

A kind of dream world for adults. From psychedelic to melancholy.

How did it start with your photographic art?

I can't name such a proper beginning. I grew up in a village where there was not much entertainment in the 80s and early 90s. That's why I was dabbled in all kinds of creative expressions. From painting, which failed miserably not least because of my lack of patience, to strange clay lump figures, musical experiments with an old Roland synthie and my first photographic attempts.
Photography then accompanied me for a long time, but so quite consciously I only started to share my work about 10-12 years ago. Tim Barber from VICE Magazine supported me at that time and when my pictures were published in the VICE Photo Issue 2009, a large audience became aware of the photos for the first time.

Where do you get the ideas for this?

The subconscious, the dream, the intangible, if you like – the mystical – but also the uncanny are my themes. And there is a lot to discover in this context: from Freud and C.G. Jung to the literature of the fantastic. Often ideas come to me when I read a text, and again sometimes a sentence or just a single word is enough. This then gets caught up in my thoughts and gives a direction, admittedly quite abstract, for a series of photographs.
And of course, music is an important influence: After listening to a lot of metal and drone for the first 20 years of my life, I've become more and more enthusiastic about Krautrock and musicians like Klaus Schulze, early stuff from Popol Vuh and so on. Everything that goes in the direction of Ambient and remains transcendently intangible. Because my photographs are just so elusive, I sometimes imagine them as a kind of illustrated book to a piece of music.

Is there an artist who has influence on you?

Not necessarily a single artist, but rather a movement that was active at the end of the 19th century, especially in France, but also in other parts of Europe: the Symbolists. For them, a picture was never a mere image. Rather, they saw their paintings as symbols of a deeper state of mind. In other words, more like a visual trigger for truth or idea.
I particularly share their predilection for mythology and antiquity. Many works are populated by mythical creatures, vampire-like figures, and spirits. Mysticism plays a big role and sometimes the settings are disturbingly eerie. 
Of course, I already have a few favourites among the symbolists. Odilon Redon, for example, but also the works of Arnold Böcklin, Jean Delville and Sascha Schneider. 

How did you get the idea to build your own equipment?

Superficial perfection has never interested me in my photography. Every smartphone camera takes great pictures, filters and software plug-ins get the last bit of gloss out of every shot. Even the intended imperfection is already perfect. You can't escape from perfection anymore.
So I looked for ways to support the photographic failure already on a technical level. So Lo-Fi instead of Hi-Fi on the image level. And since there are hardly any industrially manufactured products for this, I had to make my own lenses from metal parts, lens caps, and adhesive tape. In addition to that, I spend hours searching for old lenses at flea markets or on the net, which I use for my work.
Besides the charm of the lack of perfection, the results come visually very close to the dreamlike and the approximate that interests me, due to the blur and aperture spots.

When will you know that a picture is finished, that the work is done?

Good question. I honestly don't actively engage in that. Rather, there comes a point where it spontaneously just feels right. This means that a sequence of pictures, usually after months of trial and error, of selecting and changing everything again, suddenly seems to be coherent.
As already described, I often have a word or a term as a starting point. And fortunately there is usually the moment when the individual photographs combine to form a kind of story. This means that they then – for me – only make sense in exactly this form, size, order etc.

What is the most frequently asked question about your photos?

One question I often get asked is where I take the pictures. It is easy to answer on the one hand – but on the other hand, it is not.
At first, I travel a lot and visit places that have a special aura or power. From the desert regions of India to the mysterious volcanic landscape of Iceland or my favourite island Stromboli. Besides that, I spend a lot of time in the Black Forest, which you can surely recognize by one or the other shot.
The more complicated part of the answer is that I don't always know where every single picture was taken. Which in turn is related to my working process. I usually leave the RAW files on hard drives for months and sometimes years. And then, by chance, help myself to completely different regions and periods of time. It's a bit like the automatic writing or automatic drawing of the surrealists. So it's an attempt to switch off conscious thinking and on a more subconscious level to combine things into a theme. And since the photographs are often very blurred and spherical, I often don't know myself where or when the picture was taken.

Is there a specific order that you would sell your soul for?

I don't do contract work. Besides, I work very spontaneously. 
There is no master plan what I want to do for the next years and therefore no Faustian deal for which I wanted to sell my soul. Worst Case my soul wouldn't be worth that much to my trading partner... 
No, seriously, I used to think that it would be good to have immovable goals in mind and to organize everything down to the smallest detail. Unfortunately, the danger of cramping up increases. The most exciting projects always arise from spontaneous reflexes and more or less random constellations anyway.
Photography has given me so many, often unplanned, contacts to great people all over the world in recent years: From curators and gallery owners to other photo colleagues, photo booksellers, editors, collectors, critics, publishers, bloggers, music labels. Both individually and collectively, they are far more valuable to me than a single project now conceived before me, however, it could be.

Games night with Trent Reznor or in the indoor pool with Marylin Manson?

Both options sound exciting. If I have to choose, I'm a pragmatist. The indoor pool is just around the corner.

Do you occasionally have nightmares?

Only very rarely. Perhaps I process even the most elementary abysses in my photography and waking state.
As far as I can remember, however, I often have dreams with quite absurd and sometimes funny contexts. From temporal overlaps to spatial inconsistencies. I find this very interesting and extremely enriching.
Many years ago a clever man recommended me to start a dream diary. Unfortunately, I am not really consistent in this yet. But maybe I'll take that from our conversation for the future. Thanks a lot for the hint!

www.alexanderbinder.org

Germany, April 2020. | Interview by The Sturgheons with Alexander Binder. | Photos by Alexander Binder.