Germany, 2006
Once, while accompanying a friend at a dinner in Berlin, I met a young photographer who was going to drive to an abandoned Soviet-era asylum outside of Wannsee the next day. And I readily accepted his invitation to ride along.
There were pieces of papers with Cyrillic scribbles thrown around everywhere, and I remember being fascinated by the understated small floral pattern of the wallpaper peeling off the walls. It was beautiful. I grew up in a place where land is scarce and the people are overly obsessed with modernization- meaning no structure gets left to decay in this fashion, so this was completely alien to me. I had forgotten all about these dusty contact scans, until a friend just mentioned that he will be visiting a deserted castle in upstate this weekend.
I still think of the car ride with that boy, driving through Berlin suburbs, looking at weird yard displays and listening to funny rock radio station. I never knew why he wanted to invite me along. We didn’t have much in common, and he just happened to be gay, so his motives weren’t suspicious in that direction. All I know is that he had just finished his studies in Berlin, and was going to pursue a Master program at the Bauhaus school, and that he had a lovely face which I tried to photograph all day and failed.
