Intro by Shawn Engler
Photography by Dominik Wagner
During my last year at photography school I discovered the benefits and importance between my photographic work and the medium of a book! This is my first book in the progress of editing. A teacher once told me to edit a book like a song!
This is one of the few pictures that turned out good from my trip to Las Vegas in 2009. This trip was the one I started to capture skating from my point of view.
Well, you probably can’t tell but this is my dear friend Gabriel Hyden in Barcelona during the time we started to film for the Ground Control video. I really like how this shot turned out!
This is one of my favorite portraits that I shot. It’s part of a project I did in Berlin about teenagers.
This shot is from my first trip to New York City and it pretty much just shows a session at Coney Island! During this particular trip I was able to apply for an internship at a very good photo studio in NYC. I got the job and moved to New York for a couple of months.
Berlin clubbing at its finest! Before I left for New York, Jojo and me started a little party marathon. This is the Suicide Circus Sunday morning at 10am!
The guy I worked for in New York is pretty famous for his close-up portraits of all kind of celebrities. Every time before the shoot started we made these polaroid test shots to check the background color.
Not even two weeks after I moved into my first apartment in Brooklyn, a girl got shot in my street! This is a screen shot of footage I found on the internet. A friend of mine who was visiting me walked by this corner two minutes later. It still freaks me out it could have been him!
Who you gonna call?! I walked by the Ghost Busters station every day on my way to work. It still took my like five weeks to realize what it was… So out of this world!
I drove this van in the front every day for more than six months. It was mostly packed to the fullest. And I didn’t have a valid drivers license!
One of the few “real” skate shots I took in NY. Fun fact: The guy on the picture is my dentist.
Some really old and interesting billboard I found in the NYC subway.
After a while I started to take pictures of the people in the subway with my little film snap shoot camera. I get really nervous in these situations because I don’t want to get discovered.
Mr. Psycho Clothing Josh Diaz looking like a homeless person on the way home from BCSD XI!
My crew during one of my last night sessions in NYC!
James Perez getting high! Better look out for that dude, he is New Yorks future!
Hanging in front of my apartment waiting for the BCSD trip to get started. Not even 20 hours later everything got out of control and this guy, Kyle, fell off a roof 30ft down on a dumpster which basically saved his life!
This is/was my room mate! We actually just wanted to go out for one shot and one beer, but as usual it was never just one.
What’s left: this is the very last picture I took in NYC. The last part of my rent, a cell phone I had to borrow – because I killed mine in the washer – and a Cuban cigar as a big thank you to Mr. Shawn Engler!
I was assisting at both these shoots! The ‘National Geographic’ shoot was one of my first jobs and the one for ‘Time’ one of my last…
I love my cameras. I don’t use these cameras, it’s more like a collecting thing! I found the two cameras to the right in the basement when I moved out of my last apartment in Berlin. They where in this really mysterious box which was full of immigration papers and what not! The other one is from a Chinese flea market.
Bringing it back home: You know these crappy skate parks full of very bad graffiti where you spent most of your childhood at?! This is mine! I like to come back to places where I grew up at!
