Those, who are invited to an exhibition, who a catalog holds in the hands, will be inclined to expect art and artists. However, the pictures which are shown here do not want to be understood as pieces of art, the photographer also not as an artist, as well.

The pictures are – at a time of the overloading visual attractions and the common habit of ignoring and superficial percipience – rather an impulse to look closer and more conscious. They are an invitation to pause and to realize the “more”, the astonishing and the unfamiliar behind the confidence of the first appearance – and to assimilate the picture in the whole and the details as well: an invitation to face and to look at the world with different eyes. The origin of the pictures is the nature – as the real artist, the photographer is only her mediator.

The pictures were selected following this philosophy. The pictures were taken on trips in Central America and South America, however in Europe too, while travelling with an small sailing boat around cape horn, while walking and cycling over the Andes mountains, while moving on with a coach or a jeep. They all were taken at places where common traveller of the way does not come. And even where mass tourism rules, thus e.g. on Ibiza, picture were taken at places, where only very seldom a person pulled hard. Among nearly 16,000 pictures from these trips those were selected which bring something unexpected – beyond the first sight of the confidant. These are pictures which want to be seen in a different light.

All pictures shown here present nice colures and courageous forms. They seem familiar at a first sight – travel pictures which maybe everybody else could have taken. However, behind this something comes out with a second look what is completely different to the first impression, to the usual, even ordinary.

It inspires to look once again, still next time and then over and over again – and the longer, the more the pictures drag the viewer in themselves, invite him to read, to recognize, to understanding, to think about – every picture in his own manner.

The picture "The Caribbean" takes up the stereotype of the dream of a lonesome island – like photo wallpaper of the 70s. However, the park-bench in the loneliness shows us like a quotation that we seek the exotic naturalness, but with all comfort usual to us – while destroying exactly this.

„Winaywayna“ shows esthetic line structures at a green slope. However, when looking closer and more carefully, the dimension of an Inca's settlement are unveiled and the immense achievement and ingenuity becomes evident in the precipitous terraces - built by people at a time in which Europeans celebrated much lower achievements as a wonder of the world. Something, what we today too often forget.

„Sky over Uyuni“ shows only the second sight it’s impressive dimensions – but not of human hand: What shoves himself as brown-gray hills between the white ground and the sky are mountains, 5 to 6 thousand meters high, and the salt of the Uyuni lake stretches here over more than 100 kilometers.

The picture series „Islands in the beagle“ shows isles in the channel north of cape horn. Each of them is shone on individually successively – one by one – by the evening sun. A nice simile on own life.

Similar light games leave „Pia Gletscher“ – as well at the end of the world – every mountain flank appearing different, sometimes attractively, sometimes frightening, however always making curios.

Only with the second sight at the series "Encounters" becomes clear that the rocks in the churned up water closely north of cape horn all over and over populated with gulls and penguins – as if it is their last shelter.

Like been painted, they sit on the stones, bent by the wind and in the light which breaks its way through the deeply hanging clouds. Around them the water – whose relentlessness is given almost latent by the colours – drags the viewer almost onto itself. Every picture of this series is a perceptible, merciless spectacle of nature of wind, water, light and clouds.

"Family meeting" discloses in humorous, then, however, in a depressing manner how similar humans and animals can be. Almost draped, the cows on the alp appear amusing and familiar, nev-ertheless, they remind us astonishingly of the posed pictures of visitors on family meeting and celebrations, mountaineers at the summit and soldiers in the American civil war.

"Bay" shows a place on Ibiza, where – hardly to believe – seldom people come along. Taken almost straight down, it provides an always other height for the viewer according to the different perspective from each of the sides: first, directly on the rock edge, second, giving the feeling to look from a helicopter and third, over a long distance from the sky.

These here are only some examples of how the pictures can become accessible to the viewer. However, every recipient has to apply his own experiences, emotions and thoughts into the pic-tures. Therefore it is, nevertheless, art? Following Umberto Eco, who postulates in his monography „Opera aperto“, that art originates not from the artist, but from the recipient of the work, these are the recipients of the pictures who let art become. And thus it is in the viewers to look at them in a different light. Therefore, it is the assignment of the viewers to look at the pictures with different eyes.

It is in this sense: An invitation to face.

Mit anderen Augen: Einladung zum Sehen.