Archetype Archives began long before I had a name for it.
It began with faces.
I have always been drawn to faces, not because I wanted to copy them, but because I could not stop reading them. A face has never felt like a surface to me. It has always felt like a threshold: between what someone shows and what they carries, between the life they have lived and the life that is still waiting inside them.
By the age of twelve, I had lived in three countries with my artist family.
That sentence can sound beautiful from the outside. It suggests movement, culture, art, languages, and new beginnings. And all of that was true. But it was also difficult. Every new country meant beginning again: new schools, new rooms, new streets, new rules, new codes of belonging.
Language was often the hardest part.
When you cannot yet understand every word, you learn to read everything else. You learn the tension in a mouth, the hesitation in a hand, the way someone turns away before they say no, the kindness behind silence, the impatience behind politeness, the sadness behind competence. You learn to understand atmosphere before grammar.
I learned to read faces before I could trust words.
Reading faces before understanding words
There was a time in my teenage years when I remember wondering why people talked so much.
Why so many words?
Why so much explanation?
Why say everything out loud when so much was already visible?
At the time, I thought everyone could do this. I thought everyone could understand what someone was thinking by the smallest change in their expression. I thought everyone could sense what a person had experienced, what they were protecting, what they desired, what they feared, and which part of them was trying to come forward.
Only later did I realise this was not ordinary.
I am highly sensitive to expression. A split-second glance can tell me more than a long conversation. Sometimes I react to what I sense before the other person has confirmed it, before the feeling has become visible, before there is proof. This can make me strange in people’s eyes.
But it is also my strength.
It is the place my work comes from.
I do not look at a face only to see what is there. I look at a face to sense what is moving through it: the role, the pressure, the wound, the dignity, the future self, the inner figure that is waiting to be recognised.
The face as an archive
A face is an archive.
It carries childhood, language, family, adaptation, fear, beauty, responsibility, fatigue, desire, humour, ambition, and grief. It carries what a person has survived and what they have not yet dared to claim.
This is why portraiture has never felt decorative to me.
A portrait can become a record of someone’s visible life, but it can also reveal the invisible architecture underneath. The part of the person that has been leading quietly. The part that is exhausted. The part that protects. The part that still knows. The part that is becoming.
Archetype Archives is built around this belief.
The portraits are not only images of people. They are portraits of inner figures.
Allegory and archetype
My favourite art style has long been Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau.
I am drawn to its line, its ornament, its bodies, its flowers, its atmosphere, and its closeness to Symbolism. To me, Jugendstil was one of the most recent great peaks of allegorical and archetypal visual language after the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome.
Vienna is one of the places where this language feels especially alive to me. The Wiener Secession, with Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, and Joseph Maria Olbrich, gave Jugendstil one of its most powerful forms. Its famous motto, “To each time its art. To art its freedom,” still feels deeply relevant to the way I think about archetypes today.
In Jugendstil, the human figure often carried more than personal likeness. A woman could become a season, a force of nature, a threshold, a warning, a virtue, a dream, or a form of beauty with symbolic power. This is one reason I feel so close to that visual language. It understood that a face and body could become more than portraiture. They could become a carrier of meaning.
Women became seasons, virtues, spirits, muses, dangers, thresholds, flowers, forces of nature. Bodies carried ideas. Hair became water. Flowers became psychology. Ornament became destiny.
This is close to how I think visually.
But there is a difference between allegory and archetype.
An allegory usually points outward. It uses a figure, object, or scene to represent an idea. Justice may hold scales. Victory may have wings. A woman may become Spring, Truth, Beauty, or Death. Allegory asks the viewer to read the image as a symbolic language.
An archetype works differently.
An archetype is not only an idea represented by a figure. It is a pattern we recognise inside ourselves. It feels older than explanation. It appears in myths, dreams, stories, religions, families, art, and private life because human beings keep meeting the same inner roles in different forms.
The Mother. The Creator. The Oracle. The Guardian. The Lover. The Child. The King. The Wounded One. The One Who Returns.
An allegory may say: this figure means something.
An archetype says: this figure is also in you.
That is the difference that matters to me.
Archetype Archives is not a collection of costumes or symbolic portraits. It is a visual archive of inner roles.
The Open Studio where it began
The series was born in 2019 during an Open Studio in Cologne.
I invited random studio guests to take a place in front of my photo background. I had prepared antique and vintage dresses, fabrics, and visual elements. These were not costumes in the theatrical sense. They were materials of transformation.
Most of the visitors had not come to be photographed in this way. They were simply there, in the studio, standing in front of me as themselves.
And yet, as soon as I met them, I knew.
I knew which archetype they were closest to that day.
Not forever. Not as a fixed identity. But in that moment, in that season, in the energy they carried when they entered the room.
I could sense whether the person needed the softness of The Rose, the protection of The Guardian, the knowing of The Oracle, the threshold of The Becoming, the creative force of The Creator, or the deep holding power of The Matriarch.
The entire process took about fifteen minutes per visitor.
I dressed them. I placed them. I watched how their body changed when the right visual language touched them. I photographed them quickly, almost instinctively. There was no long explanation. No elaborate production. No psychological questionnaire.
Just seeing.
And the result shocked me.
When the image knows more than the words
Some works arrive before the words are ready.
That is what happened with Archetype Archives.
On a physical level, I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew which fabric belonged to which person, which gesture needed to be protected, which mood had to remain quiet, which face needed to turn toward the camera, which image would create calm, which one would create confrontation, which one would transform the viewer through stillness.
On a sensory level, I knew it too. I could feel what each portrait had to do. I knew whether the image needed to soothe, awaken, dignify, reveal, protect, or return something to the person looking at it.
On a spiritual level, I also knew.
But I did not yet have the words.
I could make the work, but I could not fully explain the work. I could feel its transforming power, but I could not yet build the language around it.
For years, this series lived ahead of my vocabulary.
Once Upon a Time, The Revelation, Archetype Archives
I gave the series names twice before I arrived at Archetype Archives.
At one point, it was called Once Upon a Time. That name held the fairy-tale element, the sense of story, dress, transformation, and hidden identity.
Later, it became The Revelation. That name came closer. It understood that the work was about unveiling something. Not inventing a person, but revealing a figure that had already been there.
But neither name held all the layers.
In 2025, I finally found the right words.
For the first time, the name could hold the psychology, the history, the aesthetics, and the long-term nature of the project.
Archetype, because the works are about inner figures and recurring human patterns.
Archives, because the project is not a moment. It is an ongoing body of work. A collection of presences. A record of the many selves we inhabit, inherit, resist, and return to.
The Revelation exhibition
In 2019, I created a private Revelation exhibition for the close circle of the first studio visitors.
The artworks were veiled.
One by one, they were opened.
It felt ceremonial because it had to be. These portraits were not casual photographs. They carried something vulnerable and charged. They showed people to themselves through a language they had not necessarily chosen consciously, but recognised immediately.
One of the models saw her portrait and had an emotional outburst. Tears came into her eyes. I had to hug her.
That moment stayed with me.
Because it showed me that the work was not only about how others saw the portrait. It was also about what the sitter recognised in themselves.
The image had touched something before words could organise it.
That is the power I still trust most.
The Divine Feminine and Artists to Watch
Some of the works from this body of work were later selected for The Divine Feminine exhibition by the Mediterranean House of Photography in Barcelona.
That was meaningful to me, especially because the exhibition ran in parallel to one connected to Helmut Newton, one of the artists I had admired deeply during my student years. To have my work placed in that wider atmosphere of photography, femininity, power, and image was a strange and beautiful full-circle moment.
Other works were selected for the book Artists to Watch.
These confirmations mattered.
But they were not the origin of the work.
The origin was still the studio. The first glance. The antique dresses. The visitor who did not know what would happen. The fifteen minutes. The face. The image that knew more than I could explain.
The inner figures we live with
The current Archetype Archives world includes figures such as The Creator, The Matriarch, The Oracle, The Rose, The Becoming, and The Guardian and many more. As on now, there are 33 people photographed for this series.
Each one is an inner figure we may live with at different times.
The Creator is the self that begins before permission arrives.
The Matriarch is the self that holds life, structure, care, continuity, and responsibility.
The Oracle is the self that knows before the mind can prove it.
The Rose is the self that remains open without surrendering dignity.
The Becoming is the self between worlds, no longer what it was and not yet fully what it will be.
The Guardian is the self that protects what is sacred, private, fragile, or future-facing.
These figures are not fixed identities. They are living positions. They move through us. Sometimes one leads. Sometimes one disappears. Sometimes one is wounded. Sometimes one returns when life demands it.
This is why the series keeps growing.
Because human beings keep becoming.
Why the portraits transform the room
A portrait changes a room because a face looks back.
But an archetypal portrait does something even more specific. It does not only bring a human presence into the space. It brings a role, a question, an inner atmosphere.
The room begins to hold that archetype.
The Creator may make a studio feel braver.
The Guardian may make an entrance feel protected.
The Oracle may bring stillness into a reading corner.
The Rose may soften a bedroom without making it weak.
The Matriarch may give a family room gravity.
The Becoming may belong to a hallway, a threshold, a place of transition.
This is how the works live for me.
They are not decoration.
They are presences.
They help a room remember who you are becoming.
Why I finally understand the project now
It took me years to understand what I had made.
In 2019, I knew through the body, through the senses, through the eye, through something spiritual and immediate. But I did not yet have the conceptual structure.
In 2025, the language finally arrived.
Now I can say it clearly: Archetype Archives is a body of work about human psychology, history, aesthetics, inner roles, transformation, and the ancient need to recognise ourselves through images.
It is about the face as a threshold.
The portrait as mirror.
The archetype as inner room.
The artwork as a place of return.
This is why the series matters to me.
Because it came before explanation, and then waited patiently for language to catch up.
Three ways to enter Archetype Archives
There are three ways to come closer to this series.
You can collect an artwork from the online gallery: a piece from Archetype Archives connected to the figure that resonates most strongly with you.
You can commission a Portrait Experience in my studio in Cologne, Germany, and be photographed through this language of archetypes, atmosphere, portraiture, and transformation.
Or you can join Portrait Letter Club and receive the archetype of the month as a printed card with a personal letter from me.
Each path is different. One brings the archetype into your home. One brings you into the portrait process. One lets the archive arrive slowly, month by month, as correspondence.
But all three belong to the same world.
The world of inner figures.
The world of faces that know more than words.
The world of images that help us recognise what is already moving through us.
A private invitation
If you feel drawn to Archetype Archives, it may not be because you simply like the image.
It may be because one of the figures has recognised you.
Or because you have recognised yourself in it.
That is how archetypes work. Quietly, but with force.
They do not ask for permission.
They appear.
They wait.
They return.
And sometimes, when the right image enters the room, something in us finally has a face.
