What happens when a photographic work dissolves into nothing.

When people speak about art, they almost always speak about finished works. About those images that have found their way onto a wall, into a series, into a catalogue, or perhaps, one day, into a collection. What remains almost always invisible are all those images that never came into being — or, more precisely, those images that were indeed photographed, yet never found their way into the world.

And there are many of them. Perhaps even more than those that eventually become visible.

For me, the failure of images is not a marginal phenomenon, not an unfortunate accident that happens from time to time. It is an essential part of my artistic process. Some ideas only carry for a moment. At first they appear compelling, almost inevitable, and then lose their inner necessity upon closer examination. Others are strong as concepts but collapse in execution. Still others are technically clean, carefully lit, meticulously composed, and yet, when I look at them, something remains absent.

That is often the most difficult moment.

An image may succeed technically and still fail artistically. It can be correct, precise, even aesthetically pleasing — and still say nothing. It remains surface. It does not carry weight. I believe that this is where a fundamental distinction lies between mere production and serious artistic work. Not every idea deserves to be realised. And not every realised image deserves to become part of a series.

At this point, an important distinction must be made. When I speak of failure, I do not mean the everyday selection process familiar to every photographer. I do not work with thousands of exposures from which a single “best image” is later extracted. Quite the opposite. I photograph relatively little. For every image that the viewer ultimately gets to see, there are often only three to five exposures. These usually differ only in the finest nuances: a minimal shift in camera angle, a slight adjustment of the edge light, a subtle change in exposure, or an almost imperceptible alteration in the model’s posture. These are not fundamentally different images, but variations of an image already very precisely conceived.

I am not one of those photographers who return home from a shoot with a thousand files and only then begin searching for what the image might be. For me, the image must already exist, to a large extent, before the shutter is released.

So when I speak of failure, I do not mean discarding four out of five exposures and choosing the strongest one. That is simply part of photographic practice. I am speaking of image ideas that die as a whole.

A very concrete example of this is a cycle I am currently working on: Death and the Maiden. This theme has accompanied me for some time and gripped me immediately. The idea is as simple as it is emotionally charged: the model interacts, in a sense, with herself. Once in shadow, once in light. She dances with herself, is embraced by herself, encounters her own counterpart. What fascinates me is this suspended state between intimacy and loss, between self-encounter and finitude, between eros and mortality.

I have already invested many hours in this theme — not only in the shoot itself, but above all in the conceptual work preceding it. How must the light be positioned so that the shadow does not merely function technically, but becomes legible as a second being? How must the body be placed so that a formal doubling turns into an emotional encounter? How far may the visual language move into the symbolic without tipping into the obvious?

And yet, at this moment, I am still not certain whether I will succeed in realising this theme as I see it inwardly.

This is one of the most painful aspects of my work: an idea may possess enormous force in the mind and yet refuse itself in reality. The inner image is sometimes stronger than anything that can actually be realised technically and photographically. If this cycle ultimately turns out to be stillborn, it will be, as with many previous ideas, profoundly painful.

I do not mean this lightly. There have already been series that I planned and executed with great effort. Concepts into which much time, energy and heart were poured. The shoot took place, the models were present, light and concept had been prepared, and yet in the end the result did not correspond to what I had been seeking inwardly. Not even after many hours in Adobe Photoshop.

That is a bitter moment. Because at some point even technical post-production can no longer help. An image can be improved through retouching, light control, dodge and burn, tonal adjustments and countless small corrections — but it cannot retrospectively be given the inner force it lacked from the beginning.

For me, this is the decisive measure. I must feel the force in an image when I look at it. I must sense that something carries. That the image breathes. That it possesses an inner tension extending beyond aesthetics. It must trigger something in me that is difficult to articulate — a density, a presence, sometimes almost a form of resistance.

If I do not feel this force, then ultimately it does not matter how much work lies behind it, how much time, how much emotional investment, how much technical perfection.

Then it is not released into the world.

That may sound harsh. But I consider it necessary.

This very consistency is, to me, part of artistic responsibility. Not every image should leave the studio. Not every idea deserves public life. There are works that remain in the studio, in the archive, or in a digital folder. Not because they have failed in a technical sense, but because they have not reached that inner necessity I demand from my work.

What weighs particularly heavily for me is something else still: once I have pursued a theme with this degree of intensity and it fails, it is often empty for me. There is usually no second attempt. No further version with another model. No revised concept. No “let’s simply try again.”

For me, the theme is then internally exhausted. Not objectively, but emotionally and artistically. It has used up its space. It is not merely a single image that dies. An entire image-space dies with it.

Perhaps that is precisely why failure is so painful for me. It is not only about a failed image, but sometimes about the end of an entire inner movement that has accompanied me for weeks or months.

And yet this belongs, exactly as it is, to my work. Failure does not mean defeat. It means clarification. It separates what is merely interesting from what is necessary.

Perhaps this is one of the most honest sentences I can write about my work:

Not every image is allowed to remain. And that is precisely why those that do remain may become stronger.