The Vincent Wechselberger Berlin photo project titled Catching Up on Missing Time is, at its surface, a document of a single day: seven hours, one city, two friends. But the photographs, shot last month when Wechselberger and multidisciplinary artist Noam Yarik Gil Shuster shared twenty-four hours together after two years of living apart, carry the specific weight of time that has accumulated without being spent together.
A slow day in the Berlin heat
The premise was unheroic by design. Coffee, a walk through Friedrichshain, a bike ride, and eventually a swim in the Spree. ‘When we took the shots, Noam was going through a breakup and I was busy working on producing my next book,’ Wechselberger explains. ‘Neither of us really wanted to go out and lose ourselves like we used to together.’ What they chose instead (a slow, unscripted afternoon in the city’s green spaces) turned out to be the more honest document of where they both were.
‘That day, since we were both turning a new page in our lives, escaping into one of Berlin’s big green parks just felt like the right thing to do,’ he says. The pair took turns behind the camera throughout, the collaborative authorship itself becoming part of the work’s argument: that this kind of friendship is not a fixed subject-and-observer arrangement, but something more reciprocal.
The photographs’ lightness of touch is not incidental to Wechselberger’s practice. HENI News notes that his work explores the nuanced realities of queer sex work, often drawing from his own experience, a context that makes the tenderness in these quieter, domestic images feel like a deliberate counterweight rather than a departure. The intimacy he brings to difficult or charged subject matter carries directly into the intimacy he finds in an afternoon in a park.
Seven years from Berghain to the Spree
The friendship itself began, as Wechselberger acknowledges with some amusement, at Berghain. ‘We actually met at Berghain, which feels almost funny to say out loud.’ They spent hours that night moving through the club in search of somewhere to pee, a detail Wechselberger points to again now, noting that one of his favourite images in the new project is a photograph of himself urinating, a callback to that first meeting. From that beginning, the two built a friendship across seven years of collaborative shoots and art projects before Shuster moved to Amsterdam.
‘These days, whenever I’m stuck on something, she’s the person I call, her feedback has a zero bullshit approach, and she has a way of calming me down when I spiral.’ Distance, in other words, has not dissolved the utility of the relationship, its function as a kind of creative and emotional calibration.
Born in Austria in 1998, Wechselberger has developed a practice organised around the people closest to him, a project of sustained intimate attention that sits somewhere between portraiture and archive. softcover.at covered his recent book launch, which emerged from exactly this tendency to gather the people around him into a coherent body of work. Catching Up on Missing Time sits alongside his photo series Sisters, which explores his evolving relationship with his queer siblings. ‘There’s one photo Noam took of me lying next to a dead fish, which is funny to me because I actually have an almost identical photo of my sister Flora, lying next to a dead rat while she is smoking a cigarette,’ he says. ‘Noam is basically another one of my sisters at this point, part of the family.’
The portraits in the evening light
Among all the photographs, Wechselberger singles out the portraits taken as the two settled into the grass and the light came through the trees. ‘I think these two are honestly the best portraits we’ve ever taken of each other,’ he says. ‘We held it for like two minutes, looking deep into each other’s eyes, waiting for the perfect moment where the light peaked through the trees, and it never once felt awkward. Just getting lost in each other’s souls.’
What the project finally articulates is the particular texture of a long friendship reasserting itself after separation. ‘Even with distance and time apart, we fall right back into an easy rhythm,’ Wechselberger says. ‘I think we bring out each other’s beauty, physically, but also the inner kind, that feeling of being seen and safe, a sense of calm that not many people get to see.’ The next book Wechselberger was working on during those seven hours remains in production, the photographs from that afternoon already part of the record he keeps of the people who shape his work.
