The photographer Olaf Heine probably has one of the most beautiful jobs in the world – or how else could you get closer to stars, landscapes and topics than keeping the camera very close? The results can be admired at the Camera Work gallery in Berlin from the weekend. He talks to ntv.de beforehand about what drives him, why “urge” is not the same as “pushing” and why he needs his work like he needs air to breathe.

ntv.de: A while ago Iggy Pop said about you: “[…] Olaf is a young man blessed with a clear and inescapable German eye. You better run or fight back”. In short: you can’t escape your – German – gaze…

Olaf Heine: I worked with him for a long time and at first I might have been a “young man” (laughs). I don’t hide my background, and when we first met I lived in the USA. But I think he connected me directly to Berlin, where he also lived for a while. I think if – like me – you weren’t born in a world metropolis, then you have to be driven in a certain way. I was then and I still am today. Then some things become ends in themselves in order to get ahead. For me it’s photography. Our world is quite strange and when I’m waiting for things to come to me, I don’t know if life would have the intensity that I would like to feel. You have to go there, you have to tear down walls.

A big exhibition is coming up, how do you feel?

It’s a long process, my head is full and I’m trying to concentrate on making sure everything works out.

But it’s a good feeling, isn’t it?

Yes, because it’s something creative and creative, it’s associated with positive energy. That is one of the reasons why I chose this profession or this vocation at some point.

For more than 30 years now. What was the initial spark for “I want to be a photographer”? Like all teenagers, I’ve been trying to find my place in the world and where I fit or want to fit in. I’ve always been a photographer, my father was an optician and we had cameras at home. I probably held a camera for the first time when I was eight or nine years old. And then later, in puberty, music came along at some point. I grew up in a small town and I quickly felt the limits. The music helped me to escape from my spinning mind and the confines of this small village. And that’s when the idea came up to follow up on what I heard and felt and what I saw on the record covers. I went to concerts, fought my way to the stage and took photos. Luckily Hanover, where I was born, had a reasonably lively and diverse music scene in the late 1980s.

The most famous are certainly the Scorpions, but you don’t mean them…

No (laughs), I mean Fury in the Slaughterhouse and Terry Hoax, they were my age, in their early 20s. Their manager called me at some point and invited me to show them my paintings. And that’s how it started, 30 years ago, unbelievable. Then I moved to Berlin and studied at the Lette-Verein.

So pushing into the front row at the concert helps…

I don’t think it was a push, it was more of an urge. Something almost magically attracted me. Actually, I was a rather shy guy. But the camera gave me strength and confidence. And I had a raison d’être to go where the music is made. And just as I “pushed” my way forward 30 years ago, I might still do it – in a different way – in one place or another today. Sometimes it takes a little more commitment.

Is your camera like a shield?

More like a key to various locks and doors. Without the camera, I probably wouldn’t deal with certain topics as intensively. But because the camera gives me a different approach, I can go deeper. And answer questions that I may have, or at least satisfy my thirst for knowledge in a way. For me, photography is always about reaching an understanding that I can’t reach in any other way. The camera forces me to think and get to the bottom of things. In this way I can develop and mature as a person.

If it’s your thirst for knowledge that drives you – do you know more about the person after taking the picture?

Everyone has to classify photography for themselves. In a way it is a search for truthfulness, but as far as I understand it doesn’t necessarily mean that it reflects reality. Rather, it is a reduction of reality. Like a second reality. In the end, a photograph of me is just an interpretation. She is my perspective on an issue. I’m satisfied if I can develop my own point of view. Sometimes that doesn’t work because roles are also played, which is part of it for many. The challenge is to discover something that you have not seen before. Is that true? I don’t know. Is that really that person? No idea. I would find that presumptuous if I were to think that. For me, the most important thing is the creative process, looking at a person in the moment, finding out what drives that person.

You can see a lot of that in “Human Conditions”.

I actually collected quite a bit there, yes (laughs). I try to show what excites people themselves, how they work and what inspires them. I take photos to find out what I think and feel about myself, that’s my main intention. Photography is my medium to share that. To share me For me, this series is about sharing a wide spectrum of my path, my encounters and observations. It’s about what shapes you as a person, but also as an artist, it’s about being human and being creative in particular. My photographs are narratives of the meetings I had with painters, actors, singers, creative people.

Last time we talked about “Rwandan Daughters”. Here, too, the focus is on the human being.

Yes, I definitely see a relationship there: I photograph people, whether they are celebrities or not, and the last project was about what a cruel species we humans are, what we can do to one another. Rwanda, this genocide was almost 30 years ago, but we see how primitive we humans are every day in Ukraine or Iran. All over. It is incomprehensible and very sad that we do not learn from the past. My series “Human Conditions” is about exactly the opposite, namely about how great our potential actually is. When we focus on doing positive things, when we are creative, when we seek knowledge and inspiration, when we communicate and interact collaboratively, that is the other side of being human.

Are you interested in “evil”, the aggressor, the perpetrator?

I started with “Rwandan Daughters” but then decided not to give evil a voice. And I still see it that way now. I don’t know if it’s a good thing to give everyone a voice, even though the world is asking more and more “Content! Content! Content!” required. But I’m also not a journalist dedicated to finding the truth, I photograph what interests me, what occupies me, what drives me, that’s totally subjective. When it comes to Rwanda, I was interested in the women. I was particularly interested in how the women dealt with the brutal events of 1994, whether and how the women have coped with their lives since then. What can I learn from this myself? Were you able to turn the negative into something positive? And if so, how? How do you approach your motherhood? I am a father myself. But I was also interested in the children’s perspective. How do you deal with this blind spot in your own biography? I also grew up without a father for the first few years and was therefore interested in this fact. I worked on the “Rwandan Daughters” project for two or three years and it really affected me. After that, I wanted to turn my attention back to positive, creative things.

Looking at other faces is so important. We noticed that during the Corona period.

Meeting a person, collaborating with them is indeed a gift. The pandemic has isolated us for two years and it has shown us what the special moments in a person’s life are, namely the connection, the communal situations, the happiness of being able to share the moment with others. But if you look closely now, it seems to me that we haven’t really learned anything from this situation either. The world seems to be going down in chaos, polarizing and drifting apart. That’s unbelievable.

What is your favorite photo, apart from a family photo?

It’s like asking me which of my children I love the most (laughs), you can’t. Every photo reflects a moment, an encounter, and everything together makes this – my – life. Perspectives change, so to me it’s all the same, and it’s part of the process. An actor learns to fill a role with life, a musician composes a song, a writer has a blank sheet to fill and I have a film role. Or a memory card. That sounds very unsexy, I know, but we all start with something empty. The creative process needs an impulse, and I try to capture this impulse.

An example?

For example, I photographed the painter Julian Schnabel while he was surfing because he says all his pictures have something to do with the ocean. Inspiration comes from different sources for everyone, and it’s the same for me. Sometimes it comes from the outside, sometimes from the inside, sometimes from the darker side of the personality. It is this thorn of self-doubt that constantly plagues you, unsettles you, but also drives you on. Questioning everything again and again – it doesn’t matter how famous or loved or successful someone is, how big the stadiums are in which artists perform – they also have self-doubt again and again. No matter how good you are, you come home and question everything. It is an ongoing quest to find yourself, to get to know yourself, to reflect and also to respect yourself.

When you chose the pictures for the current exhibition, what did you learn?

That I was given something with every photo. There are many older photos, but many works were created especially for this project. It’s not a given that people let you get so close. I always learn something. And when I’m standing by the sea in Montauk with Julian Schnabel and he’s riding a wave at over 70, that’s something wonderful. I spoke to Bono about the Ramones, they were U2’s mentors. Rufus Wainwright chose his home for the former home of silent film diva Louise Brooks and now looks up at her old house every morning. Westernhagen holds his first record in his hands. 50 years of career captured in one picture. Lots of little stories are given to me. And that is truly a privilege. And coming back to Iggy Pop, sometimes you have to tweak and persuade someone to do what you see in them. The warrior or boxer in him, from my “Leaving the Comfort Zone” book, he only realized later how much power resides in this image. It helps if you go to people and deal with them in their environment.

This also takes you to the most beautiful places in the world, like Hawaii…

Yes, you know those images of tiny people in huge waves that seem to be straight out of a comic book. I asked big wave pioneer Laird Hamilton, who discovered the prominent “Jaws” wave off Hawaii, what drives him. “The power of the ocean,” he said, and then he took me to a place where the power of the sea threatened to overwhelm us.

Sabine Oelmann spoke to Olaf Heine

The exhibition “Human Conditions” runs from November 26 to February 4 at the Camera Work gallery in Berlin.