Nyx is my long term project, which I started in 2005. What Nan Goldin says in her “ballad of sexual dependency”: „the diary I let people read” is also true of my project. Two of her statements in particular inspired my work: „I don't select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life” and “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.”* However, my work is both more and less than a diary. It is more than a diary because as well as recording my daily activities it also depicts a particular way of living, an ethnography. It records not only people but their surroundings and the (sub)cultures to which they belong. The photographs are personal and closeness is important to the project – I don’t photograph strangers, but friends. My project is about experiencing yourself and crossing borders between genders, mind and body, or identities. But my 10,000+ archive of pictures reveals more than this: it shows, for instance, the cultural codes behind the individuality, or hundreds of objects my friends collect. Photographing the surroundings and parts of the everyday life creates a second layer, lying above the personal, individual photographs. On the other hand the work is less than a diary because it is selective. I don’t record “every detail” and that my work “enables me to remember” is not only important because of this, but also because the access to memory allows me to forget. The aim is not to expose my friends or my own life to public. It doesn’t show all facets of my friends’ lives or of my own. Rather, the photographs collect intense moments and impressions which are personal as well as universal. In a sense, the photographs depict the night, which can be graceful, glamorous, alluring, or bewitching, but also dark, dreadful, or violent. “Nyx” is the goddess of the night.

*Goldin, Nan: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency