Every Fair from Fair Sometime Declines.
William Shakespeare
Technically, in photography a 'stop' number like f/6 is the ratio of the focal length to the aperture diameter of a lens. Its value defines the field of view, the depth of field, and indirectly the overall sharpness of an image, in other words the fraction of reality that is depicted.
Number six appears widely across human culture and often symbolizes imperfection, e.g. the enemies of the mind: lust, anger, greed, delusion, pride, and envy. However, in nature hexagons provide efficient packing and stability. Some are even tracing biology back to life's number that's within each 12C atom: six protons, six neutrons, and six electrons.
From computing (DEC SIXBIT) to hexagonal structures in neural networks (HexCNN) six is linked to efficiency with artificial intelligence as its culmination. Its current level of perfection has already caused images to lose their innocence as witnesses to reality.
illustris
Photography was the starting point for this site. Initially, the themes were transience, patterns, and human encounters—particularly intercultural ones—experienced or observed during many trips to Africa and Asia. I have seen how difficult it is to resist the allure of the exotic and to avoid viewing the world solely "through ethnographic filters", as John Ury and John Larsen put it in their book The Tourist Gaze (2011). The scene captured in the exemplary image took place in 2013 in the lower Omo valley in Ethiopia. For the locals, posing for tourists has become a significant source of income.
With a few exceptions, my photographs depict snapshots from the lives of the people visited, whether sought out intentionally or encountered by chance. Many images give a glimpse of what everyday life might look like for these people. Nevertheless, the content doesn't meet the standards of a documentary. Its value may lie in the fact that images were taken without the shootings being arranged, negociated or against the will of the portrayed. Pristine pictures were only marginally cropped and edited such as the colour scheme in the exemplary image.
Locations are mostly spread over Europe and some African and Asian countries, namely Algeria, Armenia, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Chad, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Libya, Mauritania, Mongolia, Niger, Senegal, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey.
In 2026, it was time to consolidate the content on illustris. The number of images was reduced to about one-third of the original total. They are now presented in just four galleries: (liquid)crystals in cross-polarized light, transience on vast time scales, roaming (semi)nomadic groups including pilgrims to Ethiopian Ledet, and scenes from the lives of sedentary people. Tap or click images for enlargement and captions.
AI
As much as AI poses a risk of making reality and fiction indistinguishable, it's also a fantastic tool for bringing creative ideas to life. The example below shows an attempt to create AI-generated human versions of a scene featuring “dancing” spinning tops. In each set all have identical sizes and shapes, but only the spinning tops have different masses, as they were made from metals of varying densities.
