Shortly to the picture: It is a photo that my wife took on the beach of Egmond aan Zee in Holland. I colored it, scanned it, edited it with my photo editor, especially the retouching function, printed it in DIN A3 in the copy shop, colored it again, photographed it again and then edited it again. And something like that comes out, which again looks slightly different than the picture that is currently hanging on my wall.
I have already stated at various places on this website that I regard this matter as an experiment which I also accompany self-critically. But this only makes sense if I first do everything to make it succeed. In this respect self-critical is too defensive. I want to turn it into self-reflexive. First of all, I assure all readers that I do not consider my life to be more important or more special than what you, who are reading this, are leading. But it is my life, of course, and as such unique. I do not have that ahead of you. Of course, our lives are full of commonalities, but not in the sense that we bore each other with them, but along the commonalities and peculiarities we develop our goodwill and interest in the other. Mere strangeness can only cause alienation, only when we begin to recognize ourselves even in the foreign, does the foreign become interesting for us.
I don’t want to bore you with the exhibition of a “special life”, the inflationary currency of an increasingly autodestructive media world, but rather show how stimulating (and sometimes even exciting) a normal life can be if we don’t let ourselves be irritated by the false claims to the spectacular as a normative. So I want to encourage you to also look at your own life as something special. You can write about it even if you do not belong to the “experience elite” whose currencies are the extremes: danger of death, exoticism, crime and perversion etc.. Through the intimacy of a thoughtful, self-ironic narrative, everyday life can certainly keep up with the spectacular changes of position in the world of adventure, in which even the exclamation “I was there” is misunderstood as a seal of quality.
For me, my little retrospective is not about an ego trip, not about selling out my privacy, but about encouraging everyone not to disregard but to appreciate the small spectacles of everyday life that make and have made our lives special. I hear someone calling out, “Believe it or not.” Judge for yourself!
