A little bit about myself: I was born in 1942. As a teenager when my dad gave me his old 35mm rangefinder camera, a Braun Paxette. I took my first pictures with it of family, friends, especially pretty girls and during vacations. When a student of architecture in the early 60s at an art school in Germany, I had two friends, they were twin brothers, who were both passionate photographers working only in b&w, had a darkroom and produced amazing photos, which they displayed all over the house. I visited them as often as I could to look at their latest work and watched them in their darkroom. I was so inspired that I bought a used twin lens Rolleicord. It was a simpler, less expensive version of the high-end Rolleiflex and started to join them in their passion. In 1970 I immigrated to the US and lived in San Antonio, Texas, where I met an old commercial cinematographer who owned a film studio. He was a former stuntman for Errol Flynn in Hollywood. He let me help him doing work for him in his darkroom and in return allowed me to use it for my own work when I was finished with his. Many times I spend the whole night and left his studio at dawn. I learned a lot from him how to print, using my hands to dodge and burn. Regarding books, “The Complete Photographer” by Andreas Feininger was of help early on to learn the basics of photography. In the summer of 2014 I saw The Garry Winogrand exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It immediately changed my outlook on photography. I was then living in New York City. Though the city completely lost it's character that Winogrand photographed in the 60s, it is now my city in which I roam the streets whenever the sun is out. When arriving as a young student from Europe in NYC for the first time almost fifty years ago the city in the early 70s will be virtually unrecognizable to the people who live here now and who never experienced that time. I feel nostalgic for those days before gentrification changed everything. The New York I knew then was exciting, though dirty, hard-hitting and unsentimental unlike any other city. Now the cost of living here is a constant threat to the vibrancy of New York City, especially as more neighborhoods gentrify, modernize, and become less diverse as moneyed interests move in. And then there is the “End of Black Harlem”: Blacks who lived here when Harlem was still affordable have been disillusioned. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, who wrote the mournful book “Harlem Is Nowhere,” said this about the group Save Harlem Now! just the name made her respond, “It’s too late.” She said that she and her young son were moving out. “It costs too much.” I photograph the streets of New York, looking for trends. You see everything on the street, the way people dress is most obvious. Boring yuppies and the omnipresent tourist and only an occasional 'character' now. And then there are the ugly construction scaffolds, two or three on every block on both sides of the street. Every other person is talking on the cellphone or wired to ear phones listening to music. Half of the people I see on the streets are not really ‘on the street’, they are in their own virtual world. I have no interest in photographing them. Richard Sandler, photographer of 1980s New York book "The Eyes of the City" has put down his camera, lamenting: "I think cellphones have almost killed street photography and have robbed photographers of their subjects. There is nothing more boring, nothing more nondescript and vacant than a person on a cell phone walking down the street. They seem to be out of the game. People are walking around in bubbles." I use a Leica M2 with a 35mm Summilux lens now. I shoot Tri-X 400 film. In sun light the camera is always set at f16 and at 1/250 of a second by eliminating any chance of camera shake. With the 35mm Summilux f16 has a range of sharpness between 3.5 feet and infinity. This way I don't need to fiddle with adjustments and everything is ready to shoot at a any moment. In 2014 when I started street photography I often used up a roll or even two of film. Now five years later my method of work and how I feel about it has changed. Often I go home without a single shot taken. I have set myself certain principles. No easy shots or guesses and shooting from the hip. No people on cell phones, no beggars or homeless people. I want to make photographs that one can look at decades later, photographs that are not ephemeral, my personal point of view on the world. Last year I published a photo book under the title "Encounters in the Dream State". Street shots that have a shadowy and mysterious quality. As in a dream, the characters, settings and objects depicted seem to have a fantastic or deceptive appearance, as something in a dream or created by the imagination. The viewer may be asking what is happening? What are we looking at? What is going on here? For the moment that's the trend I want to explore more.