possibility to directly control the images; in the Web you also have so-called photo-communities [cf the article by Kathrin Peters: Sofortbilder, the chapter »cameraphone canada car cat« (flickr.)], which mutually assess and discuss their images. That brings us back to the question of the good picture! In the media or in museums, whenever something emerges from the spectrum of photography this is also reflected in the area of the amateur. People develop a sense of what a good picture can be.

Working on the Image

Daniels: Where does working on the image take place for you? [2] You already described, for example, how when working with the large format camera, working on the image is carried out through correcting the perspective. With the digital picture, working on the image is carried out on an already existing image. This shifts the world-camera interface to working now with the purely image-intrinsic. And that puts you on a level like the one that painting has always existed on.

Sasse: I don’t know if it’s really helpful to ask: But isn’t this like painting anyway, and don’t painterly

aspects exist in the production process? Such work surpasses the classic, media terms and makes more alliances. This naturally plays a role when viewed from the standpoint of the production process; that much is clear to us today. No sooner I’m in the situation of inventing something with my pen-attachment on the monitor, this takes place in the sense of illusionist or realistic painting. But asked differently: Just how much of this is sculpture? I have material and I remove something from it. And this intervention happens repeatedly. I cut something out. Then I have to reinvent it, in order to close up the hole again. Perhaps that has something to do with painting. But I arrive at results that deal with fundamental artistic questions. The time needed for processing and working differs from image to image. Some can be finished in three days. That’s a short amount of time. I make 10 to 12 works a year, and each work is preceded by looking over as many as 1000 amateur images. Completing a longer work can last up to three years. I don’t turn sketches into panels just like that – it involves a long work process. The sketches [3] are made during course of the actual work, and it was after I had accumulated a