Portraits In Motion

Dear Volker Gerling, We are very happy to have you on Madaf. We are talking following your performance at the Israel Festival (2024), which was held this year in the Western Negev in the South of Israel and in Jerusalem. You created a performance for the festival called Portraits in Motion, for which you came here twice during the past year to meet people who were affected by the events of October 7th and the war that followed.

In the performance, you showcase your flipbooks and talk about the journey as an outsider, a time traveler. In your practice, you usually travel by foot from Berlin to other cities in Europe, and this was the first time you traveled by plane and car. There is a lot to unpack.

You are an analog photographer, portraitist, nomad, performer, and storyteller. I’d love to learn about your process and about the medium you have perfected during the past 20 years—hand-made, black-and-white, analog photographic flipbooks. How did you find the format of the flipbook?

At some point during my studies, we watched the documentary Meine Liebe, deine Liebe by Helke Misselwitz. In that movie, there was a very old woman with a flipbook of her as a young woman. Much later, after I had already taken my first walk from Berlin to Basel in 2003 and I had already shifted from making flipbooks of friends to flipbooks of strangers, I encountered someone who reminded me of that documentary I had forgotten about.

When I re-watched it, I had no active memory of that flipbook scene but I am sure that this moment introduced the photographic flipbook to me. The photographic flipbook is a medium that suits me extremely well in many ways. One aspect, for example, is that since childhood I have already been thinking about the nature of time, which you get between your fingers in a flipbook. Looking at a flipbook is a travel through time, a dreamlike moment. I print the photographs in my dark room and work with a bookbinder as my only collaborator to make the books.

Did you study photography? How did you start taking pictures?

I have always been very interested in photography and started taking pictures at the age of 10, but ended up studying film directing because I believed that "film" could do more than "photography" and I wanted to tell stories. However, after a year of studying film directing, I changed my studies to Directing of Photography (DOP) because I realized that I could only tell stories in a way that seemed appropriate to me if I also produced the images myself.

I like the German word for flipbook Daumenkino, "thumb-cinema." The English term refers more to the fact, that it is indeed an artist's book. The form is somewhere in a liminal space between those two ideas. It is also a book that requires the "reader" to be quite active.

Exactly. There was a moment in history, the beginning of the 20th century when flipbooks were quite popular because there was a new appetite for the moving image, but film projectors were still very rare. If you are interested in the form you could look at the website of Pascal Fouché a French historian and collector of flipbooks. He has a collection of 11850 flipbooks! (click here to see the site).

The quality and homogeneity of the black-and-white photographs in the books you make are very impressive. It’s hard to believe you develop DIY. In the performance, you flip them in front of a live camera.

I like to play with precision. I also feel I owe it to the people I photograph, to treat them and their stories with the greatest respect. Some of the moments I photograph are very intimate and the stories I tell are intimate too, and since the portrait subjects are usually not present during my stage performances, I treat the flipbooks with the greatest respect of the non-present protagonists.

I love this idea of respecting the absentees! Because performance is a time-based shared ritual unfolding in the present, it is a medium capable of making other, past, and perhaps future times and absentees visible in its negative space.  Speaking of negative space, how did you decide on the dimensions of the flipbooks?

The photos of the flipbooks are 8cm wide. I use in total a 12mm white frame around each photo, and the screws with which the flipbooks are bound have a distance of 36mm to make the number 36 visible which stands for the 36 frames of a flipbook, corresponding to a fully exposed SLR 35mm film. So the format is anything but random. It is important to me to be able to explain why the little books look exactly the way they do.

Sacred geometry. I’d like to hear more about the walks you mentioned. They seem to be essential in your practice, and there are so many different ways to think about walking. For example, Thich Nhat Hanh says that walking meditations deepen our body’s connection to the earth; the surrealist’s concept of 'deambulation' refers to a sleepwalk-like process similar to Walter Benjamin's Flaneur; and there is the pilgrimage to holy places. What’s the function of walking in your practice?

The starting point was very naïve; I just wanted to go on a long trip after my studies. I didn’t have much money because the year before I had only lived from showing my flipbooks in the streets of Berlin on a tray I built from wood attached to my chest. People who watched my flipbooks could pay what they wanted to support me and it was a bit like being a street musician but I wasn’t aware that it was a performance back then.

I was earning just enough of a living to pay my rent and food, but at some point, I wanted to travel and the only thing I could afford was to walk, so I walked from Berlin to Basel for an entire summer. 1200km. Always with my tray and flipbooks, my open-air museum in front of me. On the way, people would talk to me and look at the flipbooks and I enjoyed these two-sided, very natural encounters. Sometimes—when I had very special encounters—I photographed strangers and made a new flipbook.

The walks are essential for me because they are a perfect way to digest the condensed social moments of the performance. They create balance and make the practice sustainable in the long run. The new books I make while walking take on a different meaning, as the performance develops—everything at the appropriate pace for walking.

Interesting, so the conditions carved out the form. To the millennial that I am, you are depicting a possible lifestyle in Berlin before it became a product and rents went up. There seems to be a direct correlation between slow processes and openness to "the sacred" or "the subconscious" or however we may name these interventions. Also, you choose to flip the books in the performance, so that the images move slowly, and mindfully. How did you come to make performances?

Because someone suggested the idea (laughs). Someone asked if I wanted to be part of her theater festival in Berlin with my flipbooks and I said sure, I’ll come and walk with my tray among the audience and she said no, you should make a real performance on stage and tell the stories of your meetings with strangers. I’ve been doing this for a long time now.

The performance Portraits in Motion you made for the Israel Festival was similar in form to the others you did, but different in process. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yes. Initially, I was invited to show my regular performance, but after October 7th we decided to make a new performance. Following organized encounters during two trips here I made to Israel, I made six flipbooks of people closely affected by the massacres at the Kibbutzim and the Nova festival. In the performance, I show the flipbooks I made of portraits of David Avramov, Maoz Yinon, Orit Cohen Zadikviz, Yael Noy and her son Aviya and Yael Gershon. I tell the story of our meeting and also what happened to them and their loved ones on October 7th.

The flipbooks you made here can be understood as war photography and stand in lineage with moral debates in Europe after WWII about how to represent the genocide of Jews that had been committed. You chose to portray the faces that went through the horrors of October 7th with extreme tenderness and not in emotionally spectacular poses or narratives, more like just looking back at you.

In the context of this war, which is also a war of images on social media, that’s a radical choice. An image that stayed with me is the flipbook of simply an Israeli child sleeping in her bed with the slight movement of the pacifier in her mouth. Is this something you were concerned by and how was this related to your subject position as a German visitor here during this time?

My main concern was to be gentle because the process in front of my camera could be experienced as violent: 36 very loud shots, which take a full 12 seconds to take and I knew I was going to portray very traumatized people. That’s why it was also important to me to meet with Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, who works as a psychiatrist and author and has experience with traumatized individuals, as part of the project. I was very aware that, as a German artist, I had a special responsibility in this project. To talk about the sleeping child: Her name is Oriko Meyuhas. When I saw her at the end of my first trip to Israel, it completely overwhelmed me and I almost started to cry. I had thought so much about all the children in Israel and Gaza. What kind of world will they grow into?

In the performance, you share your thoughts about politics without sounding moralistic or forcefully two-sided. That’s a complex space to hold as a visitor. As I was sitting in the audience, Diana Taylor’s concept of "hyperpresence" in performance came to my mind—the ability to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems nothing can be done. The silence that emerges from the movement of the still images between your fingers—the way the audience was holding its breath waiting for the next image—created a space to receive the stories of the people you portrayed. For me, it was in a moment where I couldn’t listen to or see Jewish pain about October 7th anymore because it was, in my understanding, so misused by power, to justify everything that followed.

Thank you for this. I want to take time to deeply reflect on what the performance and flipbooks I made in Israel truly are and what my presence meant. It all was very dense and what you’re saying resonates on many levels. There’s a plan to show the performance in a theater in Berlin and I’m curious about how that will be different.

Where can one buy your books?

As part of my performances, and on my website, I sell some selected motifs from my flipbooks as printed versions. In these flipbooks, you will find the story behind the flipbooks on the last pages. If I have a feeling that a flipbook is particularly well received, and I am regularly asked about it, I have it printed. Hopefully, this will also happen with some of the flipbooks I made in Israel. Also, my flipbooks can be purchased as originals in a limited edition. These are genuine artist's books with embossing on the spine and housed in a slipcase, consisting of high-quality hand prints on photo paper.

Is there a local artist you would like us to invite with his/her artist’s book to Madaf?

I like the works of the photo artist Orly Zailer very much. I’m not sure whether she makes books as well. I particularly admire this work by her (click here).

It deals with the subjects of time and family in a very complex and fascinating way. I see a relationship between this series in which time is inscribed and my work, which is also about dealing with time.