Pain Is God

One day in Munich, I told my beautiful friend that I wanted to photograph him, but not in the usual way, I didn’t want him to be himself. I wanted to turn him into something else. He disguised himself. Women’s clothes. A dress with colourful flowers. Grotesque. Maquillage. Decadence. The “other” personality got under his skin. We called her/him/it “Anna” for a little while. His eyes had a helpless stare. Desperate.

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Why did I want to photograph him like this? I wanted to destroy his perfect image. I wanted to crush this beautiful, serene, polite face. This joy. Why? Because I wanted to cause him pain. I only know how to cause pain. I know this well.

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What do we all carry? Only pain. We are born in pain and in pain we leave life. Our birth is painful. The person who undertook the job of raising us, he/she is in pain too. Everything hurts and there is always a medicine for everything to soothe the pain.  But let’s not fool ourselves. Pain is always there; especially when we don’t feel it. The goal of our life is to avoid feeling pain. This is why we are all numb.

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Our parents or whoever was close to us in the first years of our lives, have been in pain because of us and have caused us pain. We have been in pain because of them. We have been in pain because of other people. Friends, partners, husbands, wives, random people. We know pain well. We give it away generously.

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No-one doesn’t want to feel pain. Pain Is God.