Before We Knew What Was Happening

by André October 18, 2026

An evening with old interviews

The other night I fell into old episodes of Camerabag TV, a series of interviews with photographers that must have been filmed around 2011 or 2012. I started with the one with Scott Pommier and didn't stop for a while.

What struck me wasn't the gear or even the pictures, at least not at first. It was the way people talked. They told their stories as if they were hearing them for the first time themselves. Curious, a little surprised, often laughing at their own luck. As if they didn't quite know yet what was happening to them.

These weren't beginners. Many of them were already well known and doing work that mattered. And still there was this almost childlike enthusiasm, and a striking absence of worry.

The impounded car

One story from the Pommier episode stayed with me. As I remember it, he got arrested during a skateboarding shoot, and the police impounded his car along with all of his equipment for a month.

Most of us would spend that month angry, anxious, or both. He went on a road trip instead. He got hold of a motorcycle and took a small Contax SLR with a single lens he had borrowed from his brother.

That's it. No drama, no lesson he was trying to sell. He couldn't change the situation, so he didn't waste energy fearing it. He just kept going with what he had in his hands.

I found that strangely liberating to watch, even knowing the footage is well over a decade old. Maybe because of it.

I also spent time with the episodes featuring Frank Ockenfels and Magdalena Wosinska. Both are a joy to watch. Frank's in particular is full of the kind of career advice you wish someone had given you early on, offered casually, almost in passing.

The work looked like that, too

The pictures from that time feel the same way. Direct, close, emotional. Documentary in the simplest sense of the word. They didn't explain themselves. They didn't come with a paragraph telling you what to feel or which larger issue they were addressing. They trusted you to look.

Where I was back then

I recognize that feeling because I had it, too. Back then I was more open and more motivated. I wanted to try everything, and I photographed constantly, all kinds of things, without ever thinking about a portfolio.

I knew even then that photography is one of those professions that rarely pays the rent. But miracles seemed possible, and sometimes they actually happened.

One of them happened in Hamburg. I was walking past the skatepark at the Rote Flora with friends, more or less by accident. We stayed maybe five minutes, because the others wanted to move on. In those five minutes, a skater bailed on a trick and simply stayed down for a moment, lying on his back, as if he had just discovered how beautiful the night sky was and saw no reason to get up.

I took the picture, and we kept walking.

Somewhere around 2020, it was gone

I can't name the exact moment, but around 2019 or 2020 that tone disappeared. Not just from interviews, but from the whole conversation around photography. The weight of the world became ever-present, everyone seemed to be competing with everyone, and so everyone was constantly optimizing themselves.

For me, it coincided with a move. In 2019 I moved to Bavaria, and for the first time I had the time and the means to think seriously about my career. I wanted to make portfolio work. But nothing was ever good enough, and most ideas didn't even survive long enough to be made.

The years went by like that, and I became more and more critical of myself. If I'm honest, today I'm closer to giving up photography as a profession than to seeing it as an adventure again. That's partly why those old interviews hit me so hard.

There's an irony in the timing. When those Camerabag episodes were filmed, Instagram was barely two years old, and smartphones were only just becoming the place where we live. Looking back, those interviews caught the last moment before photography moved almost entirely into the feed.

I wanted to understand what happened in between. Not as an academic, just as someone who reads and wonders. A few thinkers helped me put words to it.

From discovering to performing

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes our time as an achievement society. Nobody has to force us to work harder anymore. We do it ourselves, voluntarily, and call it freedom. Boss and worker live in the same person, which is why exhaustion feels like personal failure rather than a problem of the system.

The sociologist Andreas Reckwitz adds another piece. In what he calls the society of singularities, it's no longer enough to be good. You have to be unique, visibly and constantly, and that uniqueness has to be performed and recognized by others. Your work, your style, your life and your opinions merge into one curated profile.

Put those two ideas together and you get the photographer of today. Every picture is also a statement about who you are. Every post is a small exam. Curiosity doesn't fit into that equation, because curiosity means not yet knowing who you are.

I know this from the inside. As a solo founder, I am my own boss and my own employee, and the boss is never satisfied. There is no such thing as enough. I'm rarely happy with something I've done for long. More often I'm disappointed, because the world hasn't changed because of it. Time has just passed, and everything seems worse than before.

Curiosity needs an open future

Childlike enthusiasm about what comes next rests on one quiet assumption: that what comes next might be good. That assumption has worn thin.

Reckwitz writes about the end of the illusions that shaped the late twentieth century, above all the belief that things would simply keep getting better. The late cultural critic Mark Fisher went further and described a slow cancellation of the future: the feeling that nothing genuinely new is coming, only variations of what we already know. In 2022, Collins Dictionary chose "permacrisis" as its word of the year. That says a lot.

Hartmut Rosa, another sociologist, has an idea I find especially fitting for photographers. He argues that the moments that move us most are the ones we can't control. They happen to us. Our culture, though, is built on making everything available, plannable and measurable. The more we optimize, the less room is left for the kind of surprise Pommier found on that motorcycle.

When I tried to think of pictures like that from the last few years, I had to go looking. There are a few. But I had forgotten most of them almost as quickly as they happened. Maybe that's the most telling part: the surprises still come, I just don't hold on to them anymore.

The abyss or the sermon

This shows up in the work, too. A lot of what gets attention today falls into one of two camps. Either it shows the world on the edge of collapse, or it tells us how we ought to behave in it. Doom or instruction. Between the two, there seems to be surprisingly little.

Part of the reason is structural. Algorithms reward whatever triggers a strong reaction, and fear and moral judgment are reliable triggers. The writer Kyle Chayka calls this Filterworld, a place where everything gets nudged toward what performs and ends up looking more and more alike. On top of that, a clear moral stance has become a kind of entry ticket. Work that is quietly beautiful, funny or ambivalent can easily look naive, or even irresponsible.

For me, the pressure comes less from outside than from within. It feels like the world needs saving. Next to that, it has become hard to simply, selfishly devote yourself to work nobody really needs, nobody asked for, and that isn't even a sensible career anymore.

But the middle is where most of life happens. A friend laughing at the wrong moment. Morning light on a kitchen table. A road trip because the police took your car. These pictures don't save the world, and they don't scold anyone. They simply say: this was here, and I saw it. I think we need them more than ever.

Am I romanticizing this?

Probably a little. I was younger and had fewer obligations. Maybe the worries were there all along and nobody talked about them. And some of today's seriousness is earned: the world has become harder to look away from, and it's good that we look.

So this isn't an argument against caring. It's an argument against the idea that caring and enthusiasm exclude each other. Something got lost along the way, and I'd like to have it back.

Smaller rooms

If the feed is part of the problem, maybe the answer is to need it less. Not to quit, just to stop making it the only place where the work exists.

Prints. A print hangs on a wall for years. Nobody scrolls past it, and nobody counts its likes.
Books and zines. A zine in an edition of fifty is finished, physical and personal. It doesn't have to perform. It only has to find the right fifty people.
Small shows. A café, a bar, a friend's studio. Standing in the room while someone looks at your pictures teaches you more than any analytics.
Direct lines. A newsletter, a mailing list, a print swap with photographers you admire.

Kevin Kelly wrote back in 2008 that a creator doesn't need millions of people, just a thousand true fans. I'd go further. For your peace of mind, a hundred people who really look can be worth more than a hundred thousand who swipe.A small audience gives back what the algorithm takes away: the freedom to try something and fail without it becoming public record.

For a while now I've been working on a documentary project about my parents. It is personal in a way that makes no sense in a feed. A carousel would flatten it into content. My reference is Larry Sultan's Pictures from Home, a book about his own parents.

Work like that needs a room, a table, an evening, a few people who take their time. It's the opposite of reach, and that's exactly the point.

And in the work itself

The other way out is less a format than a posture.

Shooting without knowing what the picture is for.
Talking about my own work as if I were discovering it, because often I am.
Allowing pictures that are simply beautiful, funny or odd, with no message attached.
Leaving room for imperfection, and for things to go sideways.

This is one of the reasons I keep coming back to film. You press the shutter and you genuinely don't know yet what just happened. Between the click and the scan there is time, and during that time the picture isn't a result. It's a possibility. Rosa would probably call it a small piece of the uncontrollable. I just call it fun.

Back to the motorcycle

I keep thinking about that guy on a motorcycle with a borrowed camera and one lens, his car sitting in some police lot. He had every reason to worry and chose curiosity instead.

And I think about that skater at the Rote Flora, lying on the concrete and looking up. I'd like to photograph like that again. Not because it will get me anywhere, but because I want to find out what happens next.

When did you last feel that way about your own photography? I'd genuinely like to know.