Johann Husser is a young photographer from Germany. His work ranges from landscape photography to fashion portraits. Shooting primarily with film cameras, his photography offers a clean image devoid of distractions. It is imbued with nostalgia, remembrance of things past, and looking back in silent contemplation. Most of the images in this feature are from his ongoing series ‘Nowhere Town’.

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About : My name is Johann Husser. I’m 26 years old and I was born in Siberia, Russia, but grew up in Germany, in a rather small city in North Rhine-Westphalia to be precise. I moved to Dortmund in 2010 to study Spatial Planning. Right now I’m studying Photography at the Fachhochschule in Dortmund and if everything´s going to work out fine I´ll receive my BA next summer. So photography makes up a pretty big part of my life. Before I started studying it I was already photographing and experimenting with the medium. I started shooting with an old digital camera of my parents when I was 16 and then turned to analogue 35mm format after receiving an old Soviet camera as a gift from my parents´ friends from Russia. I love to be slowed down by the analogue process, to be limited to a certain amount of pictures I’m able to take. This was one of the facts why I switched to analogue medium format some time ago.

Statement / methods / equipment : The photographic projects and single images I’m taking for some time now are dwelling between documentary and fine art photography. I am not always working on coherent series. Sometimes the pictures come before the idea and the other way round. But there is a certain subject re-occurring in my photographs. Having studied spatial planning, I’m extremely interested in (sub-)urban environments, non-places and am drawn to the build landscape. My preparations differ, but usually there is a distinct mood with which I’m photographing. It´s set by music I’ve listened to or books/texts I’ve read. I understand the images I take as a reaction or a response to the music/ books. A conversation of sorts.

Right now I’m using a Contax RTSand a Mamiya 7.

Project(s) : I started to work on ‘Nowhere Town’ in 2014 and it´s still an ongoing project to date. Nowhere Town is a personal documentary project focusing on small town and suburban structures / problems. It is a recurrent view on the place I call home and the reliving of sceneries of the adolescence. Familiar places are being revisited and reinterpreted with the theoretical background of the non-places (Marc Augé). It is the ritual of coming back, even when you´re already gone, to a place that raised you.

The rest of the images I’ve taken during recent travels and have not yet edited into a coherent body of work.

Influences and favorite stuff : Music being probably the most important one, I’ll just name some bands I’ve been very euphoric about: Preoccupations, Diät, Croatian Amor and Parquet Courts just to name a few. I´ve been reading a lot of science fiction lately but ‘The Stranger’ by Albert Camus is probably the most important book I’ve read so far in my life. Photographically, Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alec Soth, Der Greif…

All photos © Johann Husser : Website | Tumblr | Instagram