Studio Stories — From Vienna to Gran Canaria.

Snapshot 1 Victoria, and the day Geli walked into my working life.

Victoria had written to me years before, because she wanted portrait photos of herself. I was just then expanding my portfolio — a classic you-scratch-my-back arrangement, so the shoot came about. What I didn't know that day: Victoria had brought along a makeup artist she had organised. A makeup artist named Angelika Oswald, today impossible to imagine my working life without. Out of that one appointment came later, with Victoria, a couples shoot in Vienna's city centre with her boyfriend, and a beauty shoot in the studio together with two other models — all indirectly organised by Geli. Sometimes it's decided on a single day who you'll be working with for the next years, without you noticing it in the moment.

Snapshot 2 From the beauty salon to the limousine.

Not the Nika from the hotel roof terrace — a different, blonde Nika. We started in Geli's small beauty salon in Vienna, which she ran on the side at the time. A surprising little world with a series of interesting locations within walking distance — including a small joinery, where we continued after a brief portrait session. The main act of the day, however, was a limousine we had borrowed for a few hours — also a Geli connection, because at the time she also organised stag and hen parties on the side and consequently had a limousine rental in her phone book. We drove up some Vienna hilltop, made stylish images of car and model with off-camera flashes, and drove home afterwards with the feeling that you don't look up jack-of-all-trades alphabetically — you call Geli.

Snapshot 3 Tiana, a wine glass, and half the body painting inventory.

Tiana was one of my first twenty shoots — I was still young as a photographer, but we were both up for experimenting and game for any idea. Bright clothes, long pointed nails, a few piercings, body paint in every mix imaginable — all in the same shoot, including the idea of composing the final frames through the reflection in a wine glass. We ran through a programme in record time that others would schedule two days for, and made a few images I still happily call very cool. There are early works you'd rather not think about later. This isn't one of them.

Snapshot 4 Zoltán Kiss, three buckets of paint and a trombone as a brush.

Zoltán Kiss of Mnozil Brass needed promotional photos for his CD, and in parallel Thomas Zeller of filmgut.at was producing a video with him. So instead of showing up twice, I was on the shoot and photographed in parallel while Thomas filmed. The location: a hall in the cultural workshop of the Melk joinery. The concept: three buckets of paint in the national colours of Hungary, and a trombone as an oversized brush. The result was a session in which more paint flew through the room than in any setup I ever did before or since. Trombonists, as it turns out, have a remarkably good throwing technique — spend years working the slide and you hit your mark even without sheet music.

Snapshot 5 Sarah in a Vienna studio, or: maximum motif density in one morning.

With Sarah: a small Vienna studio, Geli on make-up, a morning in which we ran through the entire photographic palette — high key, low key, colour filters, basically everything. Sarah was lovely and completely easygoing in front of the camera, so a single morning turned into a surprisingly wide range of images.

Snapshot 6 Gran Canaria, or: an elbow, a beach full of party corpses and a few onlookers too many.

My first shoot overseas. Two days, in Gran Canaria, with Bibiana — an Austrian who had previously worked as a model back home, at some point emigrated to the island, and was living a life there one might most accurately describe as ambitious improvisation. She lived in a mountain settlement which, at the time, had been built, let's say, without sufficient official approval, and earned her money with photo tourists — photographers looking for models on the island for their workshops and sessions. An elegant solution to a classic problem.

We had met years before, in Austria, at a workshop before which I had pulled my back and at which I could therefore only participate to a limited extent. My friend Alex carried my entire gear that day; I could hold the camera and press the shutter, that was about it. As it turned out, this was apparently good practice for our Gran Canaria reunion: a few days before flying to Gran Canaria, I had fallen into a stream during a shoot. To save the camera, I raised it above my head as I fell — a reflex decision that saved the camera's life and cost my elbow a small piece of bone. A proper repair would have endangered the trip, so I had it patched up makeshift and hoped my body would accept that. My body saw it differently, as became apparent in the months that followed — but at that point Gran Canaria was more important. Shit happens. With Bibiana and me, it seems, our meetings reliably come with some form of orthopaedic impairment.

The shoot itself happened in two stages. The first part early in the morning, at a hidden cove Bibiana had located. Getting there was a discipline of its own: she drove us in her small car, whose suspension had seen better days, and we bumped from pothole to pothole along a dusty gravel road until we arrived at a stunning, completely secluded bay. With one minor catch: we weren't alone. It was six in the morning, and several dozen sleeping teenagers lay scattered across the beach in various states of consciousness — as it turned out, there had been some Spanish public holiday the night before, and the party from the night before had, let's say, naturalised itself. We balanced quietly between the sleepers all the way down into the bay; then we worked fast — not least so as not to wake the partygoers. In the first rays of the morning sun we did a nude series in the water and in the sand, and had even one of the sleepers woken up, he would have been treated to a remarkable spectacle. None of them woke up. To my surprise, that actually worked.

The second part took place in the evening in the dunes of Maspalomas — with a dress, a cloth and similarly light clothing, much to the delight of the beachgoers who were returning to their hotels or cutting across the dunes towards the neighbouring town. Over the next hour a small but stable assembly of onlookers gathered on the surrounding dune crests, all pretending they happened to be looking in precisely that direction by coincidence. We should have charged admission, or at least set out a hat. Instead, we kept working in a focused way, trusting that the images from this setting would carry exactly the atmosphere you'd expect from a sunset in Maspalomas — and that was the result.

My elbow has never fully recovered from that trip; my relationship to Gran Canaria has. Some journeys are worth that.

Snapshot 7 A hairy situation.

Again a five-star hotel in Vienna, this time right next to the opera, and once again I was allowed to use a suite for a shoot. Geli was there — and she will not forget this day. It even gets its own chapter in the book she has been writing for ages and which somehow never quite seems to be finished. If that chapter ever appears, it is worth buying the book for that alone.

I had booked the model via an online directory — a much-requested model, professional, posing-confident, very nice. She arrived in the company of her boyfriend, an impressively built giant of a man, who marched her through the hotel lobby and there generated about as much attention as a steam engine at rush hour.

Geli started with hair and make-up, as always. What she pulled me into the next room for shortly afterwards, however, was not as always. She was pulling a face and told me with a mixture of clinical matter-of-factness and unconcealed dread that, while working on the model's hair, she had encountered a complication. A complication most elegantly described as a hygienic detail not usually among the prerequisites of an editorial shoot. Anyone who once attended primary school can probably guess the family in question.

Geli then came up with the idea that would put this day into her memoirs: "You know what — put her in the bathtub and take some photos in there. At least her hair will be washed in the process."

Some solutions are so pragmatic you wonder why you didn't come up with them yourself. That is how the bathtub images of this series came into being — improvised, but with a visual language that absolutely fit the suite and the setting. The model carried the idea without letting on that anything was off-script in the background.

Geli put the day into her book. If the book ever gets finished, it will be a bestseller for this story alone.