The sea breathes. I thought that way even as a child. It is a living organism that sucks in, exhales, and pauses briefly in between, in time with the human lungs. Looking at the sea makes me happy. There’s something about it that washes me back to childhood and won’t end. The sea is gigantic in its meditative rhythm. A metronome of beating, flowing and rushing.

I have been photographing the sea since the days of my childhood. Each wave is a sculpture in every moment of its approach and passing. The short exposure times of a few hundredths of a second chisel them out of the block of water, make them visible in all their beauty and complexity. Each wave is individual and unique, like each cloud in the sky.

I have been taking pictures of waves for years, always from the solid shore and without any technical aids except a simple camera in my hand. Sometimes I stand directly on the flowing boundary between water and land, sometimes on high cliffs and take a shoreless look at the sea, balancing my eyes along the horizon and being captured by the vertigo of the vastness. Surrounded and swept by the sea, I try to artistically tame every conceivable eddy and whirlpool, every observed surge and roll, every high tide and low tide, and the whole tide in general – like a beast that you can control in individual moments, but never manage to tame.