The « Runway » photo project is connected to the « Asphalt » and « Technik » projects from the Desiderata series. The clear connection to « Asphalt » is not only based on the motifs, but also on a different, « objective » view that doesn’t comment on an object with a change in light and shadow, moisture or perspective. The investigation of the changes in materials through humans as found in « Technik » is also shared by this project. The focus is on changes that result from a function with a specific purpose, changes that must constantly fight against the obvious superior strength of nature, whether human or otherwise: failure, decay, materials’ own authority displayed by gravity, corrosion or erosion.
The ultimate model for this is an anonymous photo in the surrealist magazine « Minotaure » from 1937. It shows a locomotive, overrun by plants, that seems to have just escaped the jungle with a final effort but is still entwined with it; it can no longer move another centimeter and so it must wait, rusting, until the forest finally devours it. André Breton called this picture « a document of simultaneous triumph and catastrophe ».
What should actually be a purely white, sharply and straightly delimited surface appears in reality as a furrowed, dramatic micro-landscape that one can almost read as music.
It already fails from the beginning: even the extremely primitive construction is not precisely realized on the asphalt. And the fate of these signs is as uncertain as their origin: despite stubborn research, it is not possible to determine (in the darkness of various shifts in responsibility and ownership) which company produced them or when. In addition, the runways, since they are no longer allowed to function as such, have huge crosses applied to them, so-called closure markers; however, they weather more quickly than what they are meant to shut down.

The Book
The « Runway » book includes one and the same image with two different titles: from the one side as 09L, from the other as 27R. It is a conscious decision to not write: « from the front » and « from the back », because this book has no « front » or « back ». However, the reading « directions » can be clearly indicated, since the motif has a geographic orientation that is expressed in the name of the runway. The book is not read from the front to rear, but rather from West to East and vice versa. Rotating the book by 180° is the equivalent of landing from the other direction.

The Image
The image of the centerline is a part of a series of large-format photos that reproduce – undistorted and at maximum resolution – the individual runway markers of the former Berlin airport in Tempelhof. It shows the 12th stripe of the so-called « centerline » of the northern runway. The stripe was photographed on April 2014 (after a first version in July 2011); this was a time when the airport was already decommissioned and utilized by the Berlin populace as a public park. The traces on this demarcation, which resulted from weathering and airport traffic, were thus augmented by traces from bicycles and skateboards. The interesting aspects of the « Tempelhof » stripe do not originate in the type of photography, but rather from the object itself: even highly resistant special paint on rock-solid asphalt is not suited for eternity. In fact, the foundation isn’t even free of tears that need to be regularly filled with cement. Time grinds this artifact down to a new Pergamon frieze – there, the battle of giants against Greek gods, here the battle of the airport administration against infrastructural decay. Details such as individual leaves of grass allow one to get a sense of the stripe’s actual size: it is, at 90 cm × 30 m, seven and a half times as wide and ten times as long as normal street centerlines. It is reproduced in the book at a scale of 1 : 2,27; it is thus 13,20 m long at a height of 40 cm.