Artist's Statement Punk.Skin.

This is a photo series of gay punks and skinheads in Berlin. I edited the work for an exhibition at the Tallinn Art Hall's City Gallery in Estonia in August 2009. The photos I chose were from different times between 1997 and that year. I did not just want to show a series of mohawks or shaved heads, but different situations between the people I'm close with and myself, and my feelings towards them. As it's a continuous work, it has grown bigger since.

I think work is more political or socially relevant when it avoids the trap of being propaganda, however worthy the cause might be. As German journalist and later terrorist Ulrike Meinhof noted, 'Private matters are political,' and I believe in taking something private and putting it in a public context. I cannot foresee the effect that may have. When I edit images, I try not to have the spectator in mind but choose a series of images that has a logic in itself and makes sense to me. Like photography itself, it's an intuitive process.

Photos serve as memory, sometimes altering my own memory. They bring order. Memory is not permanent, but permanently under construction, and that this version of my life and my friend's life is what it is, one version of the story. But seeing it all spread out on my computer screen, or as prints on the walls of the gallery, it feels mighty personal to me.