Lene on assignment for chinese ELLE MEN

In the newest issue of ELLE MEN (China) there is a big feature story on big wheels around the world. Mid may they sent me on assignment to photograph the owners of the world famous »Wonder Wheel« in Coney Island. Some days ago a copy of the magazine arrived at my place.




Shoot for GQ Germany

Some weeks ago I shot a small story for the current issue of GQ Germany. I went to Pittsburgh, Pensilvania to photograph Paul C. Mawhinney, the man with the largest record collection in the world. Paul owns more than 3,5 Million records. Due to his diabetes he became half blind and therefore decided to sell all his records. The new owner will turn the collection into a museum.

The Beatsteaks

For the german daily »Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung« (FAZ) i spent one day with the german rock band »The Beatsteaks«. I was just heading to another job as the editor called me saying it was cancelled and i should portray the Beatsteaks instead. I had seen the band performing at the Hurricane festival a couple of years ago but i could neither remember how many of them stood on stage nor in which language they sang.

I thought of crazy, wild rock n‘ roll life. I pictured myself right in it.

The Beatsteaks didn’t fit in that cliche. Instead of Jack Daniels, loud music and hot groupies i found very clean tour buses, friends of the band members cooking delicious food and no liquor. The writer and i did an interview with Torsten Scholz, the bands bass player, a couple of hours before the gig. He was a very relaxed and sympathetic guy from berlin with some pretty colorful tattoos on his arms. After that the writer left and i stayed with the band until after the show. The only thing that fit into the rockstar life i expected was their manager taking care that the journalists wouldn’t harass the band members too much.
It has been a very interesting day.

Meeting the »Seashepherds« on Tasmania.

End of last year, I travelled to Australia for a story about the »Seashepherd conservation society«. Every year the group of marine and wildlife activists launches a huge campain to the Antarctica to chase the Japanese Whaling-fleet. This year the campain contained 3 vessels: The »Steve Irwin«, the »Bob Barker« and their new top gun, the stealth boat »Gojira«. Their big goal was to detain the Japanese fleet from killing any whales throughout the hunting-season. The campain usually takes about 3 months and was lounged for the 7th time. From the perspective of the Sea Shepherds, this year’s campain was a big success, as after a few days of chasing the »Nisshin Maru« factory ship, the Japanese returned home. With this retreat, the Japanese officially ended the 2011 hunting season in the southern ocean. After information of the Sea Shepherds, the whaler’s didn’t even take 10% of their quota. Anyways, I think at the moment the Japanese have much bigger problems to deal with!

Together with a college I travelled to Hobart on Tasmania, to cover the campaines preparation and to interview the founder of the society, Captain Paul Watson.

Rückblende 2010 – Award for political photography

One of my portraits of the German politician Hans-Christian Ströbele (Green Party) that I shot for the Danish Newspaper »Information« has been nominated for the Award »Rückblende 2010« and is now being exhibited in different Cities around Germany and Belgium:

Berlin, Landesvertretung Rheinland-Pfalz, Jan 21st until Feb 20th 2011
Bonn, Haus der Geschichte der BRD
, March 2nd until April 3rd 2011


Mainz, SWR-Funkhaus, April 13th until May 13th 2011


Brüssel, Vertretung des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz, 
May 19th 2011


Trier, Kurfürstliches Palais der ADD, 
June 1st until June 17th 2011


Leipzig, Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig
, July 7th until Aug 28th 2011


Koblenz, Struktur- und Genehmigungsdirektion
, Sept 14th until Oct 21st 2011

The catalog can be ordered here.

On search for Orka-whales in northern Norway

A few weeks ago, I’ve been on assignment in northern Norway. Together with a writing college, we flew from Amsterdam via Oslo and Bodø to Narvik.Narvik is a small town, which can be seen as the getaway to the islands of the Lofoten. From here we boarded an old Fishing boat, and started our trip towards the islands.
The next days, we basically cruised around to find the Orkas, unfortunately without any success…!
We later found out, that we were not just unlucky…. Until a few years ago, huge numbers of Orkas were visiting the sheltered waters around the islands regularly to feed on there main pray, the Herring. At this time the chance to meet them was almost hundred percent.
But in the last decade, the commercial fishing industry targeted the Herring heavily. Within a few years the population around the Lofoten was almost exterminated, and with the overfishing and the disappearance of the Herring, the Orcas also didn’t come back.
»They are still there«, explains our captain, »Somewhere far out on the ocean, they are looking for Herring.«

For our story, this fact was a little challenging. A reportage about whale watching without seeing any whale, doesn’t appear very authentic! So my college changed the story a little bit and wrote about the facts of the disappearance of the whales as well as the flair on the old fishing boat and the pure beauty of the Lofoten at wintertime. I provided the photos.
Around two weeks ago the story was published as the opening-story for the weekly travel section of the Volkskrant.

It felt a bit like being in a flying military museum

I did it for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The Airborne Early Warning and Control System (AWACS) under NATO command is supplying aerial surveillance to NATO Headquarters. It has a base at Geilenkirchen/North Rhine-Westphalia.

That’s what it said in my assignement. I was told to be at the base at 7 a.m. to accompany one of their surveillance flights. That’s how I ended up flying to sicily and return without even having touched the ground.

The planes they are using remain from the time when germans still believed in the »evil-russian«. They are also used for major events such as World Cups. The engines on the planes are not being used in civilian air transportation because they’re too noisy and burn too much kerosene.

It felt a bit like being in a flying military museum. The technology is able to spot 400 planes in a circumcircle of 350 km. Regardless of the weather and the nature of the ground, because the high flying ferret aircrafts can look behind mountains which radar devices on the ground can not.

AWACS is an early warning system but it can also be used for purposes of attack. Such a machine can guide pursuit planes and missiles and spot defense installations from a save distance. One plane costs about 110 million euros, at Geilenkirchen there are based 16 of them.

How to kill a horse

A while ago I got the assignment to photograph at a slaughterhouse for horses. In fact there are too many private held horses in the Netherlands, so people are trying to sell them on the Internet. This, in many cases doesn’t work because there is just no need for these high number of animals. Especially when the horses suffer from something that impacts there function as a sport horse in a negative manner.

I photographed at a slaughterhouse before, but I was still excited when I got on this assignment. Anyhow there is a difference between seeing a pig rather than a horse dieing. It is probably because today a horse is nothing more than a pet for us. There is no longer any economical need for dobbins or working horses like a 100 years ago. Next to that horses do not get reared to feed the human race like pigs or cattle do.

But I also think, if you eat meat, you should be aware of where it is coming from. At least we should keep in mind, that the in plastic wrapped peace of meat in the supermarket was an animal before.

Anyways, I spend some hours photographing the slaughters following their work. This is how it looks:

bread ’n butter

This shall be the beginning of a little series of blog entries I’m gonna make from here on. I decided to post some of the little jobs I’m currently doing for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). It’s bread ’n butter in a way but not necessarily boring. You get to know quite some people from time to time.

Last week I photographed Thilo Sarrazin for Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. The man was the number one news topic in Germany last week. He published a book in which one of his most provocative thesis‘ is that migrants of muslim descent would have a genentic pool limiting their intelligence. And since they have a higher birth rate would be a threat to the intelligence of the entire german population. This is scientifically proven wrong but getting him a lot of attention from the german media. The man is certainly very smart and I personally think that most of his provocation is nothing but a very clever media campaign. His book is already sold out in some parts of germany. So he is making a lot of money out of the whole thing.
The meeting took place in a small café in Frankfurt. The writer and Thilo Sarrazin sat in the dark back corner of the room with mr. Sarrazin facing the wall. I was promised about 20 minutes for the shooting but after about ten he called his driver to pick him up. He seemed to be very tired after the week he had had. At the time his political party was trying to kick him out and a few days later he also lost his job as a member of the executive board of the german Bundesbank. His face remained expressionless in almost every shot.

Florian and Julius just finished their assignment for »GEO Saison«

A couple of days ago, Florian and Julius came back from their assignment for the German travel-magazine »GEO Saison«.
They’ve spent around 9 days photographing in southern France.

»We definitely had a good time down there, eventhough the metier of travel-photography was very new to us. Usually as a photojournalist you are focused on things that doesn’t work too well in our society. Most likely you are telling stories of problems, issues and difficulties.
So sometimes it was strange for us to always look out for the beautiful things around us. But we are very satisfied with the result and we definitely acquired a taste for the metier of travel-photography!«

The photos will most likely be published in the February issue next year.

Meeting in Berlin!

It’s already a few days ago, but we still want to show you some photos of our meeting at the beginning of this month in Berlin.

On May first, we went to the big demonstration of right-wing extremists to cover the event. There were around 700 fascists trying to walk through Berlin, but got stopped after a few hundred meters by an enormous amount of counter-demonstrators blocking the streets.
At the demonstration we found ourselves between hundreds of photographers, journalists and film-teams. It felt as if there were at least two press-members
for every demonstrator. Anyways, it was nice being »on assignment« with the whole collective.

Lucas publishes story on romanian gypsies in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung


In the beginning of january I travelled to Romania for the german newspaper »Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung«. My collegue Phillip Eppelsheim and I went there to cover another story, but we got a couple of extra days to look around. Maramures, the region where we have been, borders the Ukraine and is one of the poorest and most remote places in the EU. In the city of Viseu de Sus we found gipsy families collecting plastic bottles and metal at the cities dump. We were surprised to see that, because we didn’t know that this poverty is still existing in Europe. We spent two days with these people on the dump. Toxic gas was flowing in the air and one sank knee deep into the garbage. The gypsies get five euro cent per kilo of plastic bottles so they generate an income of about three euros per day. The harassment of gipsies is a common issue in Eastern Europe. The people working on the dump don’t get paid welfare even though they’re entitled to it and most of their children don’t go to school for long. People working on the dump don’t become that old. Almost everybody has liver problems from breathing toxic gases and the chances that one injures himself by grasping into glas, or even worse, injection needles from a nearby hospital, are pretty high.

It’s a bad situation that’s going on down there and it shouldn’t exist in the EU.

Fyens Stiftstidende

I just did an assignment for the danish newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende. The picture editor of this danish newspaper was my second examiner during my bachelor exam in Århus and remembered me, when he was looking for a photojournalist in Germany who could do the job.

The story was about Lars from Denmark, who came to Germany to get a special cancer treatment, that is not administered in his own country. The immune therapy in combination with the Local Hyperthermia is his last hope, but the doctor said, that »he was probably coming too late«. But Lars, who already overcame another tumor, just before the new one was diagnosted, is a strong personality, who doesn’t stop to fight for his life.

The story about Lars, was published on january 24th in the sunday supplement »Fokus« of the daily newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende.