Ghost / Warrior

The photo book “Ghost / Warrior” with the text supplement “Vom Kampfgeist der Photographie” tries to answer the question of what the fact of war in times of simulation is all about. In order to do justice to the changes since the increasing digitalization of warfare, the images are not photographic war journalism in the classic sense: the subject of the tape is the home front of the postmodern war. In a mixture of analogue technology, stylized poses and documentary aspirations, the recording itself lets you play with the game of war, as happens every week in some remote homestead in our Federal Republic.

The photographed warriors are professional soldiers or future professional soldiers who gather for "Airsoft" fights on the weekend in order to get serious again in a playful way with an increasingly alienated, digital death. The reality of our wars today has long since passed into a simulation of war in which the type of computer nerd asserts itself as the hero of our day. By simulating the simulative reality of war again in analogue war games, these nerds express an existential misery, a lack and a need: They have forgotten how to die, although symbolically they are already dead, for them the real thing is death got lost. You move between these two deaths. They are ghost warriors.