Before I Left Germany, I Gave Five People Their Hollywood Moment
There are photography projects you do because somebody books you, and then there are projects you do because you simply feel that you have to. This was one of those projects. It was my last project in Germany before I left the country that had been home for so many years and moved to Tampa, Florida, where I have now been living for the past four months. By the time I write this, I have already found my place, found friends and clients, I have already started making new work here and have had photographs shown in several venues (go to Tiger Dust or Tummo Studios ), so Germany already feels like a chapter that has closed, even though it will always be a part of me. Looking back, I am especially glad that I didn’t finish that chapter with another commercial assignment, but with something that had absolutely nothing to do with selling anything. I wanted to create something simply because I thought it was worth doing.
I went to a beautiful nursing home and photographed five of its residents, four women and one man, between 70 and 90 years old. We dressed them up, did their hair, brought out beautiful gowns, pearls and tulle, and created our own little version of old Hollywood for an afternoon. There was even champagne involved, because if I’m going to photograph somebody with a little glamour, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have some fun with it. One of the women was 94 years old, and at one point she looked at me and said, “I haven’t felt this beautiful in all my life.” I have thought about that sentence many times since then, because it was one of those moments where you don’t quite know whether to smile or feel a little heartbroken. On the one hand, it was wonderful to hear her say it. On the other hand, I found it incredibly sad that someone could reach 94 and still feel that there had not been enough moments in her life when she was allowed to feel beautiful.
We have become very good at celebrating youth and, at the same time, rather good at making people disappear once they get older. We are constantly surrounded by young faces, young bodies and the idea that everything interesting is still ahead of us, while older people are often reduced to their age, their health or the place where they live. I don’t like that. When I look at an older face, I don’t see something that needs to be corrected. I see a person who has lived. I see the things they have survived, the people they have loved, the work they have done, the mistakes they have made, the things they have learned and all the experiences that have slowly written themselves into their face. So I wasn’t interested in photographing “old people.” I wanted to photograph five individuals who happened to have lived a long time, and I wanted to give them the same attention and care I would give anybody else who stepped in front of my camera.
Once we started, the change was almost immediate. We put pearls on skin that had seen decades and beautiful fabric around shoulders that had carried entire lifetimes, and somehow the atmosphere in the room changed. People who had seemed quiet started laughing, postures became more confident and eyes that had looked tired suddenly became bright and curious. There was joking and teasing and a little vanity, which I found particularly wonderful because getting older doesn’t magically remove that part of your personality. One of them jokingly referred to the pills and medication that keep the body going as her “legal drugs,” so naturally we put the legal drugs on the table and added a small glass of champagne. I thought that was a perfectly way to show their wildness and create party athmosphere.
I also curated a scene where we experience the beautiful vibe of the old times with records, the old radio and furniture.
What fascinated me was how quickly their personalities came back to the surface once they were given permission to play a little. I think there is still a curious child somewhere inside most of us, no matter how many birthdays we’ve celebrated. It doesn’t necessarily disappear with age, but it can get buried under responsibilities, routines, health problems, family and all the other things life puts on our shoulders. Give someone a beautiful dress, do their hair, put on some music, hand them a glass of champagne and suddenly point a camera at them, and sometimes you get to see a completely different side of that person. I wasn’t trying to make these five people look younger, and I certainly didn’t want to erase every wrinkle and turn them into something they weren’t. I wanted them to look like themselves, only perhaps with the volume turned up a little. That, to me, is what glamour is really about. It’s not about pretending you’re somebody else. It’s about allowing yourself, for a little while, to enjoy the person you already are.
My Grandparents Taught Me This Without Knowing It
There is a very personal reason why this project affected me so much. My grandparents were pragmatic, blue-collar people who had lived through two world wars, destruction, rebuilding and all the difficulties that came with those years. They were not people who spent much time thinking about portraits, personal branding or having beautiful photographs made of themselves. They worked, they built their lives, they raised their families and they got on with things. A professional portrait was not something that naturally belonged to their everyday world.
We did it once for my grandfather’s 80th birthday.
At the time, I didn’t think much about it. It was simply what you did for a milestone birthday, and then everybody went home and life continued. It was only much later that I understood what that photograph actually meant. Today, roughly forty years later, I wish we had done it more often. I wish I had more portraits of my grandparents, not because I really really need a perfect photograph of them, but because I would love to have another glimpse of exactly who they were at that particular moment in their lives with the style they deserved.
There are things about people you think you will remember forever until you suddenly realize that you don’t quite remember them anymore. You remember someone’s voice, but one day you notice that you can’t hear it quite as clearly in your head. You remember the way they laughed, but you can’t quite reconstruct the expression on their face while they were laughing. You remember that they had some little habit with their hands or a particular way of looking at you, but the details begin to fade. Memory is wonderful, but it is not a very reliable archivist.
Photography is.
That is why I don’t think a portrait is simply a beautiful picture. At least, it shouldn’t be. A photograph can become a doorway back to somebody. You see their face and suddenly you remember their voice, their laugh, the way they smelled, the way they moved around the kitchen or the expression they made when they were annoyed with you but didn’t really want you to know it. Suddenly something that seemed ordinary becomes precious because you realize that the ordinary was actually the whole point.
Photography doesn’t stop time. I wish it did, because I would have quite a few people I’d like to bring back for another afternoon. What it can do, however, is take one tiny piece of time and hold onto it for us. And sometimes, decades later, that little piece becomes worth more than almost anything else you own.
That is what I was thinking about while photographing these five residents. I wasn’t simply making portraits for them. In a strange way, I was also making the photographs I wish I had of my own grandparents.
The project received even more attention than I ever expected. The local newspaper came to visit us, documented the experience behind the scenes and shared the story of these five remarkable people and their transformation in front of my camera. Below you can see not only the final fine art portraits we created, but also three of the residents receiving their finished artwork. Seeing their reaction when they held their own portrait in their hands was one of the most meaningful parts of the entire project, because the photograph became more than an image. It became something tangible, something they could keep and share with their families.
I am also sharing the newspaper article here because it captures another important part of the story: not just the finished photographs, but the laughter, the preparation and the beautiful atmosphere behind them. Sometimes the most powerful part of a portrait is not only the final image, but the journey that created it.
My Goodbye to Germany
This was my last project in Germany, and that gave the whole afternoon another meaning for me. I had already made the decision to leave and start a new life in Tampa, but leaving a country where you have spent so many years is not quite as simple as putting your belongings into boxes and getting on a plane. You leave behind familiar streets, people you have known for years, places where you have made memories and a whole version of yourself that existed in that particular environment. At the same time, you are moving toward something you have chosen and wanted, which makes it exciting and unsettling at exactly the same time.
Perhaps that is why I wanted my final project there to be about people and memory. These five residents had already lived through several chapters of their own lives, and I was just about to close one of mine. There was something strangely appropriate about spending those final days in Germany photographing people whose faces carried so much history, while I was preparing to leave my own history behind and begin again somewhere completely different.
I paid for the project myself because I wanted to do it. There was no sales package attached to it and no hidden business plan behind the photographs. I simply wanted to give these five people an afternoon that was different from an ordinary afternoon in a nursing home and to create portraits that showed them as I saw them. Not as residents, not as elderly people, not as somebody defined by age or circumstance, but as five human beings who were still perfectly capable of having fun, being vain, laughing at themselves and enjoying a little attention.
And they did.
By the end of the afternoon, the gowns came off, the hair went back to normal, the champagne glasses were empty and the nursing home returned to its usual rhythm. But for those few hours, something had changed. They had stepped outside their routine and into something a little more glamorous, and I had the privilege of watching it happen through my camera. The funny thing is, I don’t think I really made them stars. They already were. I simply gave them a little light and reminded them that they were still allowed to stand in it.
When I look back at the project now, four months into my new life in Tampa, that is probably what I remember most. I left Germany, but I didn’t leave behind the reason I make photographs in the first place. In fact, being here has made me even more aware of how much I want to keep doing this kind of work. I’ve already started creating new images in Florida and seeing some of that work find its way into galleries, but the project in Germany remains special because it was the last thing I chose to photograph before closing that chapter of my life.
Don’t Wait Until You Miss Them
If you still have your parents or grandparents, I honestly hope you don’t wait too long to photograph them. I’m not saying that because I’m a photographer trying to sell you a portrait session. I’m saying it because I know what it feels like to wish you had more photographs of people who are no longer here. Don’t wait for them to lose weight, get their hair done, find the right clothes or feel like they look perfect. Don’t wait for the house to be spotless or for everybody to finally have a free weekend. Take the photograph while they are there, exactly as they are now, because this particular version of them will never exist again.
And if they are willing to have some fun with it, make an occasion out of it. Dress them up, bring out the jewelry, do their hair, put on some music and pour them a glass of champagne. Let them feel glamorous. Let them enjoy being photographed. Don’t make the session about their age or about trying to make them look younger. Let them look like themselves, because there is something incredibly beautiful about seeing a person exactly as they are at a particular moment in their life.
My grandparents taught me that lesson without ever intending to. I didn’t understand the value of that photograph of my grandfather when I was young. I understand it now. And perhaps that is why this project became such an important way for me to say goodbye to Germany. I was photographing five people at a point in their lives that could never be repeated, while I was standing at the end of a chapter in my own life that could never be repeated either.
The five people I photographed reminded me that we don’t suddenly become less interesting because we get older, and that beauty doesn’t have an expiration date. If anything, there is a particular kind of beauty that only becomes visible when somebody has lived enough life for it to show. You can’t manufacture that. You can’t buy it and you certainly can’t Photoshop it into existence.
So if your parents are still here, call them. If your grandparents are still here, go see them. And take the damn photograph. Take the beautiful portrait, but take the silly photograph too. Let them complain about their hair, tell you that they don’t like the way they look and then secretly enjoy seeing themselves properly photographed. Those are the moments you will miss later.
One day, that photograph may become one of the most valuable things you own. Not because it is technically perfect, expensive or worthy of a gallery wall, but because the person you love is still in it.
That is what photography means to me. It is our rather imperfect way of arguing with time.
And perhaps that is the best thing I could have left behind in Germany before moving to Tampa: five people who were reminded that they had never stopped deserving the spotlight, a little bit of Old Hollywood glamour, and a lesson from my grandparents that took me decades to fully understand.
Now I’m here in Tampa, four months into this new chapter, still making photographs, still telling people’s stories, and still trying to figure out what happens when you take everything you’ve learned from one life and point the camera toward the next one.
If this story has made you think of your own parents or grandparents and you feel that they deserve to be seen in a way that truly reflects who they are, I would be honored to create something like this for your family. I am happy to curate the entire experience, from the styling and atmosphere to the photography and the finished fine art pieces, and I will bring the same patience, humanity and heart to it that I brought to these five wonderful people in Germany. Whether they want a little Old Hollywood glamour, something beautifully simple and completely their own, or perhaps a bit of both, we will create photographs that are not just beautiful to look at, but meaningful to keep. I am now based in Tampa and would love to create something truly special for your family.
