Words by Lucie Wernecke, Photography by Vincent Wechselberger

DREAMS AND HOW TO KEEP THEM : In Conversation with Vincent Wechselberger

Vincent Wechselberger's work sits at the intersection of documentary and autobiographical photography, exploring memory, the body, and queer identity through deeply personal images. His photographs hold moments of joy, closeness, grief, and rapture, tracing how identity, desire, and the body define and are defined by one another. Wechselberger has widely exhibited at leading photography festivals and institutions, including Bundeskunsthalle and NRW Forum.

DREAMS AND HOW TO KEEP THEM is an insight into the artist’s shifting internal landscape, grappling with a fraught relationship to a notorious city that is as generous as it is unforgiving. The publication unfolds over a ten-year photographic archive and documents those who have shaped the artist’s experience in the city. Spanning intimate portraits, after-hours parties, bustling dancefloors and still lives; the images featured are a powerful testament to Wechselberger’s ability to capture the delicate balance between humor and excess, between beauty and chaos. The publication is designed by John Philip Sage and includes a foreword by journalist and author Amelia Abraham, and a closing text by the artist.

Lucie Wernecke: How did you get into photography?

Vincent Wechselberger: My aunt gave me her SLR camera when I was about 12. We’d just moved into the house my parents had been renovating for 30 years and have been renovating ever since, the only one of five houses on our road. There wasn’t much else to do, so I started photographing my sisters. Then my grandpa gifted me his analog camera, and I fell in love with holding the negatives afterward.

 

I kept shooting without ever thinking it’d become my job. I actually studied psychology first, my dad was the one who pushed back: “Why are you studying psychology? Do what you enjoy and what comes easily to you.” I think I am good at it because I’ve always been drawn to people. During Covid, I finally applied to photography school, and things just built from there. Friends started asking me to shoot their parties, their portraits, etc…

 

So if there’s a turning point, it’s my aunt, my grandpa, and my dad encouraging me to follow my passion and not follow my brother’s path. He’s a psychotherapist I really admired (and still admire) growing up. Funny enough, my sister’s studying photography now too, and I’m actually living with two of them again in Berlin, which is really beautiful.

How and where do you choose your subjects? Many of your images show your own circle of friends. What does it mean to you to photograph the people closest to you?

I always carry my point-and-shoot analog camera with me; right now it’s an Olympus mju Infinity. That makes you relatively quick when it comes to taking pictures. And I don’t really choose the people; there are moments where I’m part of the scene myself, where I might see someone on the dance floor or on the couch at a house party, and then I ask if I can take a photo of them. So it’s not really that I think today I’m going to take ten really great photos.

 

What I’ve also noticed lately is that I actually don’t take the camera out that often, which shows me that I lived in the moment during the evening and wasn’t thinking about photographing at all. Often I feel like I’m missing out on the evening if I’m just chasing photos and not really present in the moment.

 

My camera is definitely a place of encounter and it’s also an icebreaker. Some people say: no, I really don’t feel like it, put the camera away. But often my camera is the reason I end up in long conversations. My next book will be about my siblings, but at some point later; for now I’ll take a break from books.

For me, it’s very important to build an archive; both for myself and to show to other people. The way we live – queer lives, groups of people who tend to stand at the margins of society – deserves a place to be seen. It’s a kind of counter-memory, so to speak, where we decide for ourselves what is shown and what we, or what I, want to say.

That’s when I think, for example, of READY, my book about queer sex workers. I’ve been doing sex work myself since I was 18 – and of course, my entry into it is a very different one, because I’m cis and come from a middle-class household in Europe. But I think in the society we live in today, sex work still gets reduced to one narrow idea – that it’s inherently forced, and that only women experience that coercion – which just isn’t true, and it erases the agency of people who choose this work. I think a lot of people also don’t realize how intertwined queer identity and sex work actually are, and how much agency and self-determination is actually at the center of it.

 

What matters to me – with my work, and now also with my latest book published with SMUT Press, DREAMS AND HOW TO KEEP THEM, a coming-of-age story – is to tell it from my own perspective: a young, queer one. The book itself is diaristic in that sense – it traces my own shifting internal landscape, but also the changing atmosphere of the city around me. I feel like a lot of people went through something similar these past years, and it felt right to make a book about it.

Why was this closeness towards your images and what you are showing in them important to you from the very beginning?

First of all it’s important to me that people know I’m part of what I’m photographing, and that it’s not voyeurism – like, I’m really half-naked at that party too, and everyone else is half-naked as well.

 

It’s important to me to take photos where people show their real self, because I think you can only really change something if you’re being honest. (Looks past the camera during the video call.) I’m currently setting up my solo exhibition in London, and I keep looking at my pictures on the wall. They’re so honest, meaning they’re not perfect but extremely beautiful in their own way.

 

For my first solo exhibition, I specifically printed analog in the darkroom, where you can’t really retouch anything – that means I can’t remove pimples, I can’t remove scars, I can’t make bodies slimmer. With the rise of AI and this whole flood of generated images we’re exposed to every day, I believe it is necessary to show real people and real moments.

With HOLES, which you published in 2023, you are celebrating taboo body parts. What did you want to make visible that otherwise remains forbidden?

I love talking about my butthole, honestly. In my friend circle, it’s completely normal to talk about it openly – not so much in the rest of society. A few years ago, my good friend Max asked me if I wanna photograph holes at Whole Festival, a queer music festival outside Berlin. So we applied, got some funding, and built a photo booth where I shot 70 people in the same position – on a leather chair with their legs up. Afterward, I interviewed many of them, because I wanted their stories.

 

We made a photo zine plus people’s stories centering their holes, or whatever they wanted to share. They turned out to be funny, political, sexy, and medical. In the end, it became a series nobody had really done before, where people just talked about their butthole. A print from it was later exhibited at NRW-Forum in a huge format, four by six meters.

Your book READY grew out of your own experience as a sex worker and portrays queer sex workers from New York to Bangkok. How did your view of sex work change – or got confirmed – through working on this project?

My view didn’t really change, because my view is that of a queer sex worker myself, and the work is about queer sex workers. I gave everyone between 50 and 100 euros for their time, because it was important to me to value their time – especially since I also photographed in places like Bangkok and Mexico City, where I worked with people who work on the street.

 

In READY, there’s a paper change in the middle, with interviews to read. I wanted to know: what do you do before you see a client, psychologically and physiologically? What’s your routine before going to work, basically. I didn’t want to tell the story only through my own gaze, through my photos, which I myself can also manipulate – I wanted the voices of the people I photographed to be in there too.

You once said that Nan Goldin has strongly shaped you. Unlike her, who often describes her chosen family as a substitute for a difficult relationship with her own family, you've mentioned that you have a good relationship with your family, and that all five of your siblings are also queer. How has this background shaped your view on family, friendship, and chosen family in your work?

My brother, who’s seven years older, was the first to come out, and I followed a few years later. My dad never really said much about it – for him it was already just how things were. My mom had some trouble with it at first, but I think it was just new for her. Also I did shock people a lot, with my interests, my going out, the nightlife, sex work, etc..

 

But now we’re at a point where my family isn’t afraid or worried anymore – instead, they see that what I do is important, even if it’s sometimes excessive and reckless. I’ve noticed that when I’m honest with them, it works. Since then, I basically don’t lie to them anymore – sure, there are white lies and things like that, but nothing more.

I’m just lucky that my siblings and I are so similar. We share the same moral values, the same political views, and we overlap a lot in terms of identity. Because of that, I have their backing, which lets me push even further — I know I can always come back to them, and that we’ll support and help each other.

 

My parents and my siblings are also in my new book, DREAMS AND HOW TO KEEP THEM, because it’s so important to me to show that this works – that you can live a life like this and your parents are still there for you and accept you as you are, and your siblings are there for one another.

 

I think that’s actually why the chosen family works a bit differently for me. For me, it’s more of an extension, my actual family already feels like a chosen family in a way, so the friends I’ve picked up along the way just widen that circle rather than replace anything. I’m literally living with two of my sisters again in Berlin right now.

What influence have Berlin and Lower Austria had on you as a person and on your photography? And what's the difference between the two places for your work?

I really loved growing up with my parents and my siblings, but I still wanted to get away from Austria, because there was nothing there for me. It was so small. But I think differently about it; now it’s a place to rest again, somewhere I really love to go. Back then I wanted to meet more people who were like me, who also wanted to live out their real identity. That’s why Berlin meant finding and building my own home, life, and friendships.

 

My mom always used to say I’d come home looking so tired. I needed to rest because I was out and about all the time. And now, when I’m there and photographing, it’s something completely different — there’s not much going on, but I really enjoy it.

 

After moving out of my parents’ house, it took me about four or five years before I started photographing at home again to find peace with it and see the magic.

 

In Berlin, I grew into the person I am today. I met so many interesting, inspiring individuals, people who live outside the system, outside the box. Berlin let me experience myself in new ways and gave me the actual subject matter: the nightlife, my friends, the queerness, the excess. DREAMS AND HOW TO KEEP THEM wouldn’t exist without Berlin specifically; it’s a document of what this city does to you, how it shapes you and sometimes breaks you a little, too.

In times of social media, what value do you think photography still holds today, especially for the younger queer generation?

We were just in London this past weekend at the ICA, because my publisher, SMUT Press, was part of a book fair there and gave a talk. I’ve noticed that since Covid, or after Covid, there are a lot more print publications again. People really want something in their hands, because for so long you could only meet online. I think that’s only going to grow further.

 

Also, with AI, individuality has become extremely important, finding your own way, being singular. Just things you can actually touch, that aren’t just stored somewhere in a cloud. That’s why I love photo books so much: as long as you don’t burn them, they’ll last a very, very long time.

 

Queer/underground culture and print publications, they go hand in hand. Queers and punks etc. have always produced a lot of zines, shirts, pins. And a lot of people are trying not to be on Instagram anymore. I’d love to not be on Instagram myself, if I didn’t need it for my job and for visibility.

With DREAMS AND HOW TO KEEP THEM you're opening up your archive of ten years in Berlin – parties, friendship, intimacy, but also loss. Unlike READY, where you portrayed a community that was foreign yet related to you, here you're looking back at your own decade. What was it like to make yourself and your own life so openly part of your image archive, and were there moments where you hesitated to show something?

It was like a ritual, going through my digital archive on my hard drive again and again, to re-encounter moments and people I hadn’t been in contact with for so many years. This past year was shaped by writing to a lot of people I used to be very, very close with, to ask whether I could include their photo in the book. I also did a lot of it for myself, to reflect on what I’ve actually done over the last ten years, coming to a big city from a small village, getting to know and living out my true self, and then somehow losing and finding myself again in this excessive world, and meeting so many people. That was already a lot. And I think a lot of people go through that.

 

I wanted to show that it’s not just hedonism, but a search for real, genuine connection and love, that we’re all actually looking for the same thing, but don’t dare to say it out loud. It took me a really long time to find a title, and then at some point it occurred to me that we all have these dreams, and in Berlin it’s so easy to end up on a track where you forget you ever even had them. Then you wake up, and it’s ten years later, and you ask yourself: what have I actually been doing? I think the book is about everyone who has their dreams and is still pursuing them.

 

I hesitated for a long time and thought a lot about whether to show substance use and nudity, mostly the substance use, because I didn’t want it to be picked up as just a book about sex and drugs. But I decided to show it anyway, I think leaving it out would have been a falsification of what it is.

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