MK: Is there anything from your past that you feel has had a dramatic influence on how you create images today?

TK: I believe the biggest influence came from art history classes and conceptional abstract thinking. What is an image - what is a picture? Which picture has the right to be placed on a wall (when it’s not for decoration only)? The Bechers and their students were high on demand, but I could not understand their works at all. Still, today I have major doubts. Not about the Bechers and their creation of a new term of typology in Fine Arts, but more about the function of documentary photography becoming fine art. I was taught that the task that an artist has to solve, is to give something new to this world. Pure documentary does just replicate what is already there. Classes in the history of medieval painting, about sculptures and cubism, lead to the question of time and multiple perspective in an image, neglecting the renaissance old concept of a central perspective.

MK: What is it about your artistic practice that you feel is represented most significantly in your photographs?

TK: My photographs serve different layers of meanings. One is to break architecture into pieces - to break something that we know as very stable. Second, is to confront our own idealistic image with my works that shows us that we cannot capture the world like we visualize it. Of course, I am using film, not Photoshop, which means that I am not doing a collage. I am following a concept - a story board. I use film, because the 35mm film has built the basis for the history of our technical image today.

MK: Once you have maintained a successful career as a photographer, is there ever any pressure to outdo yourself or continue to prove yourself?

TK: Well, you always have naysayers and people who envy you. There are basically two different concepts of being an artist: The one that continuously invents himself anew, or the other one who follows one idea. The city where I live in, Siegen, has dedicated an award to living European painters every 5 years, among them painters like Morandi, Bacon, Geiger, Freud and Toroni. Those always give me the energy and the trust that it is worthy to artistically explore a small corner of visual and intellectual interest. The more knowledge I find in that niche, the richer my work becomes.

MK: Do you collaborate with likeminded individuals on projects, or do you find it more productive to handle everything yourself? Are there any collaborations in the past that have been particularly beneficial?

TK: I am mostly working alone, but I am always networking with fellow photographers that I have met in person on my curatorial projects and exhibitions. I enjoy meeting my friends and colleagues and find criticism very productive.

What I enjoy, is bringing my studio up to a different level, where I can employ others or have multiple interns to assist me in projects, administration, production and creation. Most beneficial have been residencies and commissions that challenged me - like at The Boston Athenaeum turning my interest towards interiors, in Brasilia photographing the naked architecture of concrete by Oscar Niemeyer, or getting involved in local, but Russian, cultural history with Georg Wilhelm Henning. The most painful for my muscles was working two days in the studio, always half on my knees, doing a fashion shoot in my style. Every challenge has led to specific new knowledge for my work within the grid of my contact sheet, most recently turning buildings into waves and partially leaving the contact sheet into other forms of Fine Art.