About children’s games and inspiration

I want to know: Where does inspiration come from? This is a question I ask myself especially in its absence. I wish I had a good answer, but I don’t. It’s just there. Or it’s not. I don’t know where inspiration comes from but it might be possible to find out what it is that inspires us. If I look at my photography work, photography work that wasn’t created for a paying client, but created on a whim, following a spontaneous feeling, I can recognise a shared theme: My subjects are usually sad and beautiful fairies and princesses from nightmares, myths and fairytales. They live in enchanted forests submerged in mystical golden light.

They are a vivid expression of my childhood imagination. I grew up at a lonely place in a forest in Bavaria. This world was the only world I knew for a long time. The forest felt endless. But with every day I grew up, my world became smaller and smaller. I never could have imagined to get on a plane and travel to the other side of the globe in less than twenty four hours. As a child, even the trees in the forest felt too big to wrap my head around them.

In my imagination I was a lonely fairy princess who had to live from berries and call deers and birds her friends. I was Snow White without a prince and a castle.

Sometimes, I still revisit these places from my childhood with nothing but my camera, but I don’t quite know why. I feel myself drawn to it in a way I cannot explain. Is that what inspiration is? How much of what we are fascinated by has been shaped in our childhood? I wonder how much child we all still have in us and how much of it we ever show to anybody.