What a strange being! I think he comes from Plato’s cave. Does he pay rent there, or does he live for free? He always wears black.
Is he in permanent mourning? Who died? I’m not interested. I’m alive, and very happy to be even if it means I pay rent.
I have another doubt: does my ego pay rent to live in me? I’ve never seen a penny from him. It’s clear he’s a squatter. What do I do with him? Fuck! I didn’t want to talk about him, and I end up doing it. It’s always the same with me. What’s in it for me? I don’t know. What’s in him for me? A lot.
Every day I find myself in a battle between him and my inner child, and fuck! I just want to have fun, to have a good time, and he wants recognition and approval from others. Oh wait, I’m often looking for the same thing myself. So I think it’s normal that there are days when I realize that, really, I’m him.
I mean, I’m not me; I’m just a shadow of myself. That may sound poetic, but it’sa bitch, because it means he and I swap places in the physical world: he is who he pretends to be and I’m not. I’m a fake Dominic. Mind you, I pay rent.
During the COVID confinement, I discovered a previously unknown paradise: the rooftop of my building. I spent much of the day walking in circles there, like a hamster, while listening to podcasts and enjoying what little fresh air we could.
Sunny days followed one after another, and with them my shadow began to catch my attention more and more. I don’t remember the exact moment, but suddenly one day I found myself taking out my phone to snap a picture of my shadow “sitting” on an old plastic chair that had always been there but had never caught my attention until that moment. “The presence of absence”, I thought, as the title of that photo at that very moment.
As a result of that photo, many others followed many on my rooftop and later others on the street, when COVID finally allowed us to go out. To this day, I continue to capture images of my shadow. I don’t know if it has become an obsession, or if it’s simply a stage in my photographic career. The fact is: I enjoy it very much.
For these photos, I still use my phone, with a neck mount that allows me to place it and, with a remote shutter release, have both hands free to play with them and the elements of the scene.
Starting from pure fun, I aim to create photographs that evoke sarcasm, irony, conceptualism or poetry, for example.
About Dominic Dähncke
Every day, he tries to make his ego which longs to be an artist and bathe in fame and money succumb to his inner child. The latter is the only one that guarantees fun, which is the main reason he fell in love with photography; the former is that little bastard who, with a profiled beard and a goatee meant to make him look interesting, boycotts his playground and drags him to a battleground built for the occasion. Ego versus inner child. Appearance and smoke versus fun and essence. That’s where he’s at.
He likes to use photography as that spaceship that, as a child, allowed him to take trips invisible to the adults around him. The ship never left his hand, but with it, his mind traveled to faraway places. With the camera, it’s exactly the same: it doesn’t go beyond his hands, but with it, he travels to unknown worlds hidden within his routine surroundings.
It’s clear that he has a Peter Pan complex not physically, but mentally and spiritually. He doesn’t want to grow up in that sense. He wants to keep forever the capacity for wonder that we all have as children and that gradually fades as we become adults. It is a daily struggle within himself. Being a professional photographer also adds another ally to the adult version he constantly fights, since clients are adults and they tend to want the “adult” version of their projects. So, whenever he gets the chance, he swaps his adult glasses for childlike ones, takes his spaceship, and travels through his context to truly have fun and be amazed by the wonderful invisible worlds that surround him.
To top it off, he has a version of himself that wants to be an artist. He feels he must pay some attention to it. So, one can imagine the chaos inside him: inner child, professional photographer, and artist. Thankfully, a few years ago thanks to the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin he learned to flow with everything around him, and above all, with what circulates inside him. In other words, he refused to be the pilot of the spaceship and accepted being guided by “the pilot.” And he is on that journey now. [Official Website]
