Postcards from Taiwan #1
A visual retrospective.
The first in a series—part documentation, part reflection—on four months of living in Taiwan. Shot on Kodak Gold 200 with a Ricoh FF-9 point-and-shoot.
The limited first set of printed postcards is now available for sale!
We returned to Taiwan in November 2023.
It had been a long time coming. We first lived in New Taipei City in 2016 and 2017—a dense, fast-moving stretch just outside the capital. But by the end of 2017, we had to leave unexpectedly due to health reasons and start over in Germany.
In 2020, we planned to go back. We booked flights. Then the pandemic began, and the world closed down. Three more years passed.
When we finally landed again on the island—lush, warm, familiar—it felt like something had come full circle. We stayed for four months.
It was a long wait. It was worth it.
A Place That Pulls You In.
Being back in Taiwan felt close and familiar, but also quietly overwhelming. The island has a rhythm all its own—dense cities, layered mountains, sea, jungle, heat. We returned to places we missed, crossed paths with people we hadn’t seen in years, and found new things in the spaces between. It’s a place that never really lets go.
Photographing Taiwan.
I’ve never been drawn to photographing people. What interests me more are human-made spaces—places shaped by design, function, or chance. I try to document how these places make me feel at the moment I press the shutter. What they say. What they leave unsaid. Often, that means finding something quiet or strange in the everyday.
My color work falls somewhere within the New Topographics tradition. The first images from my “Made in Taiwan” series were taken between 2016 and 2017.
Taiwan is well-suited to this kind of photography. Growing up in Germany, I was shaped by a particular visual order—architecture, signage, infrastructure, materials. In Taiwan, those patterns are disrupted. Familiar things are reinterpreted, reshaped, or simply replaced. The results often feel blunt, improvised, or disjointed—sometimes even brutally banal. But that’s what makes it interesting. There’s something revealing in how space is used, how things are built, how places are left behind.
It’s a way of discovering. Of seeing, reading, and trying to understand.
Tech Talk
All images were made with a Ricoh FF-9 point-and-shoot. Unless otherwise noted, the film is Kodak Gold 200. I develop everything myself, using a rotary drum in my home lab, then scan the negatives with a Nikon D810. The conversion is done with Negative Lab Pro in Lightroom.
If you have questions about the process, feel free to reach out.
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Get your Postcards from Taiwan!
Postcards from Taiwan #1 are now available as haptic products. Buying one set of Postcards will support this project and my analog work. Limited to 6 Sets!