New York Edited – On the streets and beyond

»New York Edited« is the result of a cooperation between the International Center of Photography in New York and the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin. Every year the photo editor students from Berlin choose 12 stories that were shot by the ICP photojournalism and documentary photography students in New York, sequence it and layout a book or a magazine.

»New York Edited. On the streets and beyond« gives us an insight into the city that never runs out of interesting stories and fascinating people: beautiful, paralyzed, depressed, curious, blind, vivid, dangerous, busy, colorful, isolated, peaceful, precarious, divided, and proud are only some of the words to describe the diversity of people and places documented in this book. (From the foreword of the magazine, written by Nadja Masri, Head of the photo editors‘ program at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin)

I’m thrilled to have my picture chosen as the cover image of this really beautiful magazine.


Run over the pages of the whole magazine here. My series starts at minute 1:27

Misplaced plant pictures in »Project M«

Some of my plant pictures have just been used to illustrate an article on the present economic situation in »Project M« Magazine. Taking pictures of misplaced plants in public spaces has been a small personal side project for the past 5 years.


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.

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:

Catalogue of the 2nd Lumix-Festival

We are happy, that we were part of the exhibitions at the 2nd Lumix-Festival for young photojournalism in Hanover. For those who couldn’t come to Hannover to see the exhibitions, or for those who were there and would like to have a souvenir to remember all the great works, there are good news: A catalogue with extracts of each reportage, that has been exhibited + all information about the photographers has been published.

In case you missed to buy one at the Festival, you can now get the catalogue for 20 Euros at the Bookshop in the House of Photography in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg or you can order it via email: bookshop@deichtorhallen.de

The countdown of the »2nd Lumix festival for young fotojournalism« is on!

Next week on Wednesday the 16th, the »2nd Lumix festival for young photojournalism« will start in Hanover!
Today the official festival newspaper was released. The cover of the 14 000 copies shows a portrait of Hermann Völxen, the protagonist of Florians story »The last remaining farmer in Hanover« which will be exhibited at the festival.

German photo-magazine refers to Kollektiv25

The german photo-magazine »Profifoto« reports on our collective. On page six of the newest issue you can find an introduction of our characters and you get an idea of our philosophy.

Next to that, we had some other online-publications in the last weeks. Here is a list with links, refering to photos and interviews of us.

Flare – Magazin für junge Fotografie
Augenblicke – Fotomagazin
Photo Presse – Online News
Urbanshit – Blog für StreetArt und urbane Kultur
fotoMagazin – Online Magazin

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.