HOLGER THOSS.com

OBSERVATIONS & NEWS  more.holgerthoss.com

Progeny
Surrender
WALK

Archive


LOOK, DON’T THINK!

Observations, parallels, and juxtapositions. Attempting to transcend the physical and cultural dimensions of photography.
Wittgenstein's command is our mantra.

PROGENY

BATHING ON THE RIVER RHINE

 PR.001.0001
YSIDRA P.

So what, exactly, links me, Holger Thoss, and Paul Cézanne?

As a child, I used to go to the creek in my hometown to splash around with my friends. Oftentimes, I would wear one of my Dad’s oversized shirts over cotton briefs, an echo of the spontaneous moment in which I decided to take off my clothes and jump into the water. There is even a photo somewhere of me and friends pushing a makeshift boat along the creek, each of us in various stages of undress. We felt entirely at ease, indulging in the innocent sense of security unique to childhood.





This memory came to me when viewing Holger’s panorama of his family on the River Rhine. Children in striped boy shorts wade through the water, sometimes appearing multiple times in the same frame. They move on a kind of pilgrimage to and from the boat where the adults reside—their repeated selves tracing the stages of approach, arrival, departure, and return. I saw myself in the girl in white underwear and remembered how liberating it felt to be that comfortable, that Edenic, in my skin.I also couldn’t help but be reminded of Cézanne’s La Barque et les Baigneurs (1890). Cézanne’s painting is also a panorama, with similar subjects and trees that define the frame's boundaries. While the figures in La Barque et les Baigneurs appear to be adults, Cézanne’s ambiguous brushwork and modulated shading democratize the human form. These ageless, genderless bodies, caught in varying moments of rest and motion, become vessels onto which the viewer can project themselves.  Though both images allow for open interpretation, I feel gently guided toward a sense of prelapsarian innocence. The unabashed nakedness feels refreshing and honest, untouched by guilt or shame.
Considering Holger and Cézanne’s works, I return to the creek of my youth, to the pure joy of communing my body with nature. Art, for me, stirs something long tucked away. I haven’t returned to my hometown creek in quite some time, and the memory of studying Cézanne’s bathers in school is one retrieved from the back of my mind. Holger’s Progeny panoramas unearth these recollections for me. I can’t help but wonder if I can be the girl in the white underwear, preserve this Edenic peace as I age, and become one of Cézanne’s beings reclined by the riverside.

The Progeny panoramas give me access to the fleeting parts of my childhood. I am grateful for these moments, when I can look beyond a specific family in a specific place and relive a personal moment.

I wonder what memories this image stirs in you?

SURRENDER    

A MOMENT ONSTAGE

 SU.001.0002
YSIDRA P.

What if a wedding were a ballet?

Viewed together, these photographs unfold like a ballet performance. 

The woman to our left appears poised in the stage wings, her back strong yet expressive, holding the quiet composure of a dancer settling into character. That held stillness then gives way to motion—a body enters the space, spinning with abandon as momentum builds. 






In the final image, that energy releases fully, bursting outward in a leap that ignites the room like fireworks.

This progression, from pause to movement to release, links these three photographs taken at different weddings into a story of a ballerina transitioning from pause to flight.

This creation of chronology from seemingly disconnected moments calls to mind Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet (1945) series. Captured across various Ballets Russes companies, Brodovitch’s photographs coalesce into a single choreography, with dancers from different productions seeming to replace one another midair.

Like Holger’s wedding photographs, Brodovitch’s work is experienced not as a sequence of images but as a performance, favoring swirls of motion and exhaled pauses over the specifics of time and place.
 Though they photograph different subjects across distinct eras, both Holger and Brodovitch trace an invisible choreography of stillness and energy, staging a delicate exchange between pause and release. Whether turning their lenses toward weddings or ballet, each artist draws seemingly disparate worlds into a shared rhythmic logic.

As I look at these works, I am reminded of my time as a ballerina and of moments spent at weddings. The longer I linger on these images, the more my sense of linear time fades, replaced by the feeling of a performance always about to begin.

PROGENY   

ON BRUEGEL AND PROGENY

 PR.002.0003
YSIDRA P.

When does play become prayer?

The first thing I noticed in this Progeny panorama was the intensity in the children’s faces. 

Drifting to and from the kiddie pool in the distance, the children move with quiet precision, their focused gazes guiding us toward the bocce game in the foreground. The girl, poised to throw, seems lost in her own world, while the others watch with steady anticipation. What looks like simple play holds a surprising gravity—children, young and unburdened, inhabiting a concentration that feels almost adult in its weight.




It is the rare intensity in these children’s expressions that brings Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games (1560) to mind. Like Holger’s panorama, Bruegel’s painting is a layered cacophony of action, with subjects appearing multiple times across the canvas.
 Amid the jump roping and ball games, each child wears the same calm, focused expression. They receive a level of attention that rivals even that given to adult subjects, reflecting Bruegel’s visual argument that, in God’s eyes, the world of children carries greater significance.  Though created in different eras and across different genres, both artworks capture the focus and drive of childhood that is often overlooked.


They remind us of hours spent filling notebooks with stories or standing at the easel, the rare freedom of youth to lose oneself in a single task. In this way, both Progeny and Children’s Games reveal how these moments of serious attention in early life form a universal language, one that resonates across time—even in scenes filled with strangers.

ARCHIVE  

KOCHANI Z POLSKI

 AR.001.0004
YSIDRA P.

The darlings of Poland?

Somewhere in Poland, two women dance.

To the left, a woman is swept up in the fervor of the dance floor. She hangs suspended in a moment of ecstasy, her sweaty hair and parted lips radiating desire. The couple emerging from the smoky interior amplifies this sense of unrestrained freedom, their exit out of frame echoing the unspoken invitation: “Do you want to get out of here?”




On the right, a different woman holds our gaze. Her pale face and white suit draw the eye, yet her partial concealment by a male partner suggests she is being pulled into the surrounding darkness. Those around her move in a dignified waltz, a quiet counterpoint to the sexual abandon of the couple in the previous frame.

You would never guess these photographs were taken at the same club.
 Holger traveled to Poland in 1993 to document everyday life during the nation’s first democratic elections. Amid visits to children’s hospitals and rides in police cars, he frequented nightclubs, curious to see how the country’s shift toward liberalism was shaping youth culture. What he found, I think, can be summed up by these two women.

Though captured on the same dancefloor, they emerge as emblems of Poland’s cultural negotiation and progress. One dances independently, her tight dress and model-like poses echoing Western 90s culture; the other moves with the guidance of a man, tracing the waltz’s predictable 1-2-3. Neither is freer than the other—they exist as two sides of the same coin.
 These dancing women are products of a society still defining freedom. Outside the nightclub’s escapist glow, sex shops appeared in the shadow of Stalin’s Palace of Culture and Science, a reminder that while the market embraced commercial sex, Soviet rigidity lingered. Women protested the dismantling of safe abortion care, yet the very democracy that curtailed their reproductive rights also made their dissent possible.

By photographing nightclubs, dancers, and youth culture, Holger reveals how mass culture can illuminate a country’s democratic status more vividly than newspapers ever could. His work feels urgent today, inviting us to consider how our own everyday experiences reflect the sociopolitical contradictions shaping our world.

SURRENDER 

THE MASQUE OF HYMAN

 SU.002.0005
YSIDRA P.

Can one move beyond the threshold?

Haste, tenderlady, and adventure;
The covetoushouse would have you enter,
That it might wealthy be,
And you, her mistress, see:
Haste your own good to meet;
And lift your golden feet
Above the threshold high,
With prosperous augury.

— Ben Jonson, “The Masque of Hyman” (1606)





The custom of carrying a bride into her new home stretches back more than a thousand years. In Ancient Rome and later in medieval Britain, it was believed to guard her from malevolent spirits said to linger at the threshold, ready to slip through the soles of her feet and disrupt her future within the household. Over time, the ritual softened into a lighthearted gesture of good fortune, the couple crossing the doorway as a symbol of their commitment to building a life together.
 Despite the tradition’s modern interpretation, Holger’s photograph of the threshold crossing feels more ominous than joyful. The panoramic lens unsettles the background, tilting the foreboding house and tall grasses in a way that disrupts our sense of order. Guests congregating in the front yard could be viewed as spirits guarding the bride’s entrance into the home, their obscured faces contributing to a sense of eerie anticipation.

Yet our bride and groom appear serene.

I like to imagine this couple crossing the threshold not simply as husband and wife, but as partners ready to face the uncertainties of the future. Though she is being carried, the bride drapes a gentle arm over the groom’s shoulders, a gesture of trust and care.


He guides them straight toward the home, even across the slightly unsteady backdrop. The house looms in the distance, its foreboding presence softened by the thought that it waits only for the couple to arrive—to be filled, dressed, and made a home.

Poet Ben Jonson called crossing the threshold a “prosperous augury,” a divine omen of future success. Perhaps the disquieting elements in this photograph are simply signs of prosperities yet to come.

This is why I love wedding photographs. Stripped of presumption, they reveal how joy, affection, fear, and suspense overlap to shape love itself, showing what it takes to build a partnership grounded in trust and steadiness.

ARCHIVE 

WILKENROTH LANDSCAPES

AR.002.0006
STUDIO

WILKENROTHER LANDSCHAFTEN
Exhibit at Deutsches Haus, NYU, April 9th - May 31st 2025

Following the paths of his parents and his younger self, Thoss reflects on how a childhood immersed in nature and family shapes one’s sense of being.

The series meditates on the universal experience of life and on how the union of the divine and the grounded self echoes the world's natural cycles. Drawing on his family’s deep connection to the German landscape, Thoss explores how an upbringing rooted in nature informed his personal embrace of the separation between self and universe.

more info

A LOVE LETTER TO IMAGES

Introducing the 
Look, Don’t Think! 
blog and its collaborators.

by Ysidra Paczkowski

A collector friend of mine once told me that to truly understand a photograph, you need thirty minutes and a magnifying glass.

At first, this was annoying to hear.

It is in my biology to be impatient. I love art, yet I used to pride myself on making it through the Louvre in a single afternoon.

Working with Holger, I am beginning to understand what my friend meant about the beauty of slowing down and carefully unpacking all that a photograph can hold. When confronted with his images, I feel as if I am falling into an unfamiliar and exciting way of viewing the world. His work stops me in my tracks and beckons my attention—to the subjects, the composition, and even the tangible presence of a photograph within an artist's book.

To introduce myself, my name is Ysidra Paczkowski, and I am collaborating with Holger to define the overlapping narratives behind his work. I love images, and before this, had worked as a Photography Conservation Technician and even designed an exhibition on twentieth-century émigré photography at The Contemporary Jewish Museum.

Working one-on-one with a single artist for an extended period has sharpened my powers of observation and strengthened my writing skills. I have learned to approach one artist’s practice from multiple perspectives, teasing out the ways a work can connect to a painting, a mood, or the everyday rhythms of my own life. I have gained an appreciation for the artistic potential in wedding photography and for the topographical hierarchies hidden in family portraits. I find myself walking the streets as Holger does with his WALK series, instinctively taking imaginary snapshots of unexpected moments.

This collection of observations is both a love letter to images and an exercise in thinking about photography beyond the vernacular constraints we often impose on the medium.

© Holger Thoss, Top