Weekend Stories
I enjoy going exploring on weekends (mostly). Here is a collection of stories and photos I gather along the way. All posts are CC BY-NC-SA licensed unless otherwise stated. Feel free to share, remix, and adapt the content as long as you give appropriate credit and distribute your contributions under the same license.
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Martin Parr (1952–2025)
When I read that Martin Parr had died on December 6, 2025, I was personally affected. Parr, who revolutionized documentary photography with his distinctive style and critical eye, was not a just a figure for me, but someone whose work had accompanied my own way into photography for many years. Long before I had a clear sense of what kind of photographs I wanted to take, his images shaped how I looked at everyday life, at leisure, consumption, and the small, awkward rituals people perform without noticing themselves. His death marked the loss not just of an influential photographer, but of a perspective that had quietly challenged how photography could observe the ordinary. In this post, I’d like to reflect on Parr’s influence on photography and share some personal thoughts about his work.
Gregory Crewdson Retrospective
On the same day I visited From Dawn Till Dusk, I also saw the Gregory Crewdson retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. Initially skeptical of his heavily staged photography, I ended up deeply impressed by how many small narratives unfold within each large-format image and by the extraordinary quality of the prints. In this post, I share a few reflections and photos from the exhibition.
From Dawn Till Dusk: Shadows and light at the Kunstmuseum Bonn
In October 2025, I visited From Dawn Till Dusk. Der Schatten in der Kunst der Gegenwart at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. The exhibition presented shadow as an image-producing element in its own right, ranging from historical references to contemporary installations. I liked the playful and surprising ways shadow was used in the artworks. Here are some photos from the visit.
The Bonnefanten Museum: Curating sacred and secular art in a modern architectural space
On the same day I visited the Basilica of St. Servatius, I spent several hours at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht. Experiencing both places in immediate succession made it clear to me that sacred and secular spaces are not opposites, but different ways of structuring attention, meaning, and presence. This post reflects on how architecture, display, and framing shape perception across religious and modern cultural institutions.
The Basilica of St. Servatius as a symbol of the complexity of European cultural heritage
I visited the Basilica of St. Servatius in Maastricht in August 2025 without a plan and without the ambition to decode Romanesque art. The building simply drew my attention. Inside, what stayed with me was not a single object, but how the space itself shapes behavior: scarce light, lingering sound, thresholds that slow you down before you notice you have slowed down. The basilica feels like an accumulation rather than a finished statement. Sacredness here is not an invisible property. It is learned, reinforced, and maintained through architecture, story, and repeated use. And yet, the quietest stillness I found was not in the nave, but in the cloister, where nothing demands attention and meaning is allowed to arise or dissolve. In this post, I share some reflections and images from that visit.
How languages begin and vanish: A short follow-up to our series on language and writing systems
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a short series on the origins of languages and writing systems. In that series, we explored how writing systems emerged from earlier forms of communication, how they shaped human history, and how different cultures developed their own unique scripts. A recent documentary on Arte addressed the question of whether all humans once shared a single ancestral language. An interesting topic and I thought that it would be an ideal opportunity to return to this subject. In this post I therefore summarize and discuss the main points of the documentary, which continues the themes from last year’s series, but examines them from a different angle. Here, the focus is on spoken language itself: how humans create new forms of communication, how languages evolve, and how easily many of them vanish. Thus, this time we shift from writing systems back to the spoken languages that underlie them.
Kloster Steinfeld: A visit to a monastery between history and the present
In June 2025, a lab retreat brought us to Kloster Steinfeld in the Eifel. Chosen for practical reasons rather than religious ones, the monastery revealed itself as a place suspended between monastic architecture and contemporary use. Basilica, cloister, and garden coexist with seminar rooms and guest housing, quietly exposing the tension between Christian permanence and functional transformation. In this post, I’d like to reflect, in the wake of my earlier post series on both Christianity and Buddhism, on how Kloster Steinfeld embodies Christianity’s shift from theological authority to cultural repurposing.
Meeting modern art in the Ruhr Area: A visit to the Folkwang Museum
In May this year, we spent a day in my hometown and we used the opportunity to visit Museum Folkwang nearby. The museum sits right in the center of Essen and, thus, within the former industrial area of the Ruhr region. Even though one might not expect a museum of modern art to be so important in a formerly industrial region like the Ruhr, the Folkwang Museum is an outstanding example of how art and culture can flourish even in such contexts. The museum actually has a long history that is closely linked to the development of the Ruhr region, but also to modern art. In this post, I recap some of the highlights of our visit and illuminate the museum’s historical and cultural background.
A compact classic: My time with the Fujifilm XF10
After my brief detour with the Ricoh GR IIIx, I found myself falling into another corner of online camera hype: the Fujifilm XF10. It is a charming and capable little camera with authentic Fuji colors and a uniquely compact form. But in the end it simply did not align with my personal taste the way the X100VI does. Here are my thoughts on it.
A few thoughts on the Ricoh GR IIIx…and why I returned it
In my quest to fix the unsatisfactory iPhone camera experience, I started thinking about alternative ways to always have a ‘real’ camera with me. My Fujifilm X100VI is compact for what it is, but I still do not carry it everywhere, so that I miss a lot of small everyday moments I would have loved to capture. This is how I ended up trying the Ricoh GR IIIx – for a few days. Here are my brief thoughts on it.