Large cities have been the center of my photographic practice for approximately 20 years. Over time I accumulated a large amount of cityscapes and portraits from cities all over the world. Since 2011 more than half the world population lives in cities. This gives me further motivation to travel to cities I hadn’t visited yet.

I am on the pursuit of the “universal city“ – of cityscapes that when looked at in a series, resemble an anonymous mood and hardly reveal in which city they were photographed. That is the reason why I am traveling to cities that are new to me and are located in different parts of the world. I am mainly interested in cities, that are not so well known in the West. Not Paris, London, New York, San Francisco but rather Astana, Baku, Tashkent, Lagos. These are places that might reshape society and economy in our near future, cities with dynamic growth. I do not want to miss witnessing these moments.
Oddly I “discovered“ Astana in a TV documentary on the architect Sir Norman Foster who has been quite active in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. Founded 1997, the city today has a population of roughly 1 million.

It can be seen as a symbol for a nation on the search to redefine their identity. Having formerly been part of the Soviet Union for such a long time, the Kazakh were stripped of their ethnic identity. Today they are on the verge of a massive change – new wealth brought by the oil industry enables growth, the cyrillic alphabet is about to be replaced by the latin alphabet, making Kazakhstan more accessible to Western economy.

During my travel to Astana in October 2017 I found a modern city in the middle of nowhere with hundreds of kilometers of step around it. Where in the old days nomadic Kazakhs would set up their camps, today Astana resembles a petrified mirage in the flatland.
And the Kazakh culture that used to be based on horses, is now based on cars.