After completing my training as a photographer, one thing was clear to me: I didn’t want to take portraits anymore.

Not because I didn’t like people, but because of an inner conflict. The standards I set for my work seemed incompatible with what portrait photography allowed me to do at the time. There were too many variables and too little control. Too many expectations—from outside and from myself.

So I withdrew from people as a subject.

I started photographing things. Still lifes.

Objects have no biography, defend no role, and fear no judgment. They are what they are. Light meets surface, form meets space. Meaning arises in silence. For me, this was a form of clarity.

Perhaps also a form of protection.

Because a portrait is always an encounter. And every encounter carries the possibility of failure. You not only see the other person, but you also become visible yourself. The camera points in both directions.

It was only with the passage of time that I realized what I had actually been avoiding. Not the genre, but the uncontrollability. People cannot be classified like objects. They elude us. And that is precisely where their truth lies.

Today, I take portraits again.

Not to capture something, but to let something happen. A glance, a hesitation, a moment between posing and letting go. A good portrait doesn’t answer questions, it asks them.

Perhaps the detour via still life was necessary to understand that portrait – photography is not about control, but about relationship.