Sebastian Hermeling

I’m Sebastian Hermeling, a German photographer based in Paris.

My work is rooted in observation and in situations I encounter rather than construct. I am interested in how life manifests itself in places: through people and their interactions, movement and stillness, visual patterns, and the traces we leave behind.

Working intuitively and increasingly in series, I explore both what makes places distinct and what feels unexpectedly familiar across them.

I don’t look for subjects. I find them.

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MOTION [book]

UN APERÇU DU SEPTIÈME CONTINENT

At the Edge of the World – Antarctica

INTO HOLY

The Cigar-Smoking Lady- Nyaungshwe, Myanmar (2020)

Feel free to download the latest Portfolio as a PDF

Photography, for me, is a form of attentive observation. It changes the way I move through the world and what I notice within it. I am not necessarily drawn to the extraordinary. Often, it is everyday gestures and encounters, movement and stillness, objects, traces of use, or visual patterns that catch my attention. I am interested in how life manifests itself in places. In the ways people work, meet, spend their time, and use the spaces around them. In what they create, use, alter, or leave behind.

My way of working is rarely structured or planned in advance. This does not mean that photography happens casually. For me, photography is less a plan than a mode of attention. I consciously carry my camera because I know I will encounter situations that interest me, without knowing beforehand what they will be. Whether in everyday life or while traveling, I follow intuition and curiosity and respond to what unfolds around me. Photography can then develop into an intense and intuitive flow. Seeing and photographing begin to merge. One image leads to another, my perception shifts as I photograph, and new relationships and possible images emerge. I don’t look for subjects. I find them.

This spontaneity does not contradict deliberate visual choices. What I encounter provides the starting point, while I remain conscious of the subjectivity inherent in every photograph. Through framing, perspective and composition, through color, movement or exposure, what I find becomes my interpretation. I do not document an objective reality. I photograph my perception of it. Aesthetics are essential to me, but they should not become an end in themselves or exaggerate what is there for the sake of immediate visual impact.

People rarely interest me as isolated curiosities. I am interested in the individual as part of a larger situation, in their relationship to other people, to an activity, a place, or a culture. My attention therefore extends beyond the individual to the contexts in which human life takes place.

Many years of extensive travel to very different parts of the world have fundamentally shaped the way I see. The more places I encountered, the more often I came across things I felt I had seen somewhere else before. Even small observations begin to repeat themselves across time and geographical distance. Patterns emerge in how we work and act, how we interact with one another, how we build our cities, or simply in what we leave behind. Cultural expressions differ, while much beneath them remains surprisingly familiar. The longer I photograph and travel, the more I am interested not only in what makes a place distinct, but also in what feels familiar within it. My photographic archive is increasingly becoming a visual memory in which new observations encounter previous experiences.

I increasingly think in series. A single photograph can condense a moment, but a broader sense of a place, a situation, or an atmosphere often emerges through the relationship between several images. While the individual image often arises spontaneously, the context is constructed more deliberately. Selection, sequencing, and presentation are therefore as much a part of my photographic practice as making the photographs themselves. Through photobooks, image sequences, and exhibitions, I bring together observations that may initially have emerged independently. Distance and proximity, overview and detail, stillness and movement, direct observation and abstraction can coexist and complement one another.

I do not see abstraction as a departure from reality, but as another way of interpreting what I encounter. Movement, geometry, color, or light can detach a place from its immediate description without completely abandoning its origin. Sometimes reduction can convey more about the experience of a place than its most precise description.

I do not want my photography to explain what the world is or prescribe a fixed reading of it. My images emerge from my own experience and perspective. They may raise questions, contain humor, or reveal contradictions. What matters to me is approaching people and places with openness and respect, without turning them into spectacle.

Finally, I am interested in photography’s particular relationship with time. A camera can extract a fraction of a second from a continuous flow of events. What might have passed, been forgotten, or gone unnoticed in the next instant remains as an image. The viewer can decide how long to stay with it, where to direct their attention, and what meaning to give to what they see. Perhaps this is one of photography’s essential qualities for me: it does not merely preserve a moment. It gives us the opportunity to look at it more closely and perhaps discover something that would otherwise have remained unseen in passing.

September 2026