What you see is what you get.

The other day I had a long phone call with a friend. She's a photographer, like me - and she sounded tired. Not physically, but on that lower frequency where thoughts reside. It was about pictures that are beginning to resemble each other, portraits that tell less of a story than they used to. About the feeling of going round in circles. And the question of how to move forward without losing yourself.

It's a topic that concerns many photographers I know. Because at some point, when the technique is in place and the eye is trained, another battle begins: the battle for relevance. How do you create something new without diluting your own signature style? How do you remain contemporary without surrendering to the zeitgeist? And how do you counter the growing distance that increasingly comes between photographer and subject when curiosity becomes routine?

I still remember my early phase in portrait photography very well. When I started photographing people, it was like a discovery. Not just of the faces - but of the encounter itself. There was a special energy in the room, an invisible current that emanated from a look or the way someone held their shoulders. Every shoot was a little adventure. Unpredictable. Lively. And yes - exciting in a beautiful way. I didn't want it to end. I'm looking for that energy again today. And I wonder whether it has disappeared or whether I have forgotten how to let it in.

Perhaps this is what Anselm Kiefer meant when he said in an interview that every artist is in a constant movement between origin and departure. If you stay too much with yourself, you become decorative. Those who detach themselves too much lose their depth. The dilemma is well known: If you stay true to your own audience, it can be at the expense of further development. If you seek the new, you run the risk of no longer being understood. Kiefer tried to unite both - through material, through scale, through myth. So what do we photographers do when the format is predetermined, the setting clear and the view too often practiced?

Great portrait photographers - Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Peter Lindbergh - had their methods of breaking this circle. Some looked for radically new faces, others traveled to places where no one knew them. Still others changed the lighting or the focal length, not because it was technically necessary, but because they wanted to irritate their own vision. It was never about change for the sake of change. It was about sharpening one's own perception again - and recapturing a sense of wonder.

And so you try it yourself again and again. One minute you're photographing portraits, the next you find yourself in a nude shoot. For years you only shoot in black and white because you believe it's the purest form - and suddenly you start to lose yourself in color. Not because you want to follow a trend, but because it suddenly feels right.
At the same time, however, the small resistances grow. The efforts to find new faces - unspent, untouched ones - turn into a tough game: writing, exchanging, phoning. Then weeks of radio silence. No appointment. Or it happens, but too late - too late for the moment that could have been something special. And that also happens: You're no longer looking forward to the shoot because your face has already been in five other people's pictures. Photographers who repeat the picture they've been taking for years - only with a new surface.
And then you suddenly lose interest. Not out of arrogance. But because it no longer feels like an encounter, but like a reproduction.
Do others know this too? Is that part of it?
Because I'm not like that in normal life.

And yet I sometimes find myself starting a shoot like a doctor starting a consultation. Precise, polite, efficient - but with an emotional distance that was previously alien to me. Perhaps this is a form of blunting. Maybe it's protection. Maybe it's just the price of a profession that consists of encounters. Because every face that you don't see completely new becomes a variation on an old image.

Maybe that's also the reason why I keep coming back to the M. It doesn't allow you to work hastily. It demands attention, a conscious way of seeing - almost as if you were looking at the world through a decelerated medium. A return to the essence of the portrait.
The view through the rangefinder - or through the Visoflex if I don't feel like putting on my glasses - remains reduced: no superimposed lines, no flashing numbers, no animated histograms.
What you see is what you get, they say somewhere. And sometimes that's exactly enough.

And then there are those rare moments. When something opens up in a person's face, when their expression suddenly becomes brittle or completely still in my head. When everything is just right - the light, the posture, the look. These moments remind me why I once started doing this. And that what we are looking for is perhaps never completely lost. It just needs to be found again from time to time.

What helps? The search, I think. For new people, for unfamiliar perspectives, for unrest in one's own system. Perhaps this is what ultimately unites artists: not the style, but the urge, this drive to keep moving. And the knowledge that the most recognizable thing about one's own work is often not the visible - but the invisible. The attitude. The doubts. The time you take before you press the shutter button.