Margo asked me for a short bio and a mugshot, so here I’m fulfilling this embarrassing duty. Bios – and mugshots, like this one of me pretending to be part of the economic elite, the mainstream order, the garb here a useful disguise that allows me to see life on the other side – just impose an image that clutters the airspace, unbalances the reception. I wish you’d forget that you saw any of this! My bio amounts to so very little anyway. Better to talk about the true landscape.

Tropical North Queensland looms large in my spirit, I have worked there on banana plantations on and off, “humping” bananas. Yes it’s painful sometimes. I travel when money permits, which means rarely, and take photographs – utterly physically exhausting to dissolve your ego and give yourself totally to the surfaces around you. To the art. A decent photo shoot is like running a marathon. I like Asia and Eastern Europe in particular, one day I’ll make it over to Italy and France. I’m not completely unknown in the photojournalism genre; some people in Melbourne and Perth might recognize a couple of my snaps. Henri Cartier-Bresson is fantastic, even today we can learn a lot from him.

I worked for a professional theatre company in Australia for a while, translating (in cohorts with the director), writing programmes etc. – contemporary foreign stuff. My words were performed. Had an average of about five bums on seats per performance, on rainy winter nights. This was the wilderness. I’ve worked as a translator for a major German newspaper, specializing in articles on philosophy, history, archeology and architecture, absolutely brilliant stuff, mostly written by specialists in the field, not journalists. The Germans have really got it together in the news media, despite the exceptions.

I love ideas and talking about them. Europe is great for that. My favorite philosophers are Albert Camus and Leszek Kolakowski. Language-wise I get by in Japan, China, Russia, Poland, Germany and Australia. And Tropical North Queensland. I love discovering a society from the inside, trekking to remote villages and talking to locals, communicating in whatever way we find, discovering other civilizations, which means individual people too. Lived in Japan for a while. Somehow I can get by even if I only know ten words of a language; and even then people tell me their life stories on our first meeting. I’ve written a few essays on cinema, one of my passions. (Something in the genes maybe my grandfather used to run a cinema.) Some have seen the light of day in Cinema Papers (Australia) and in a book published in Austria on the Russian director, Valery Ogorodnikov. I know for a fact that Vladimir Putin has a copy of that book, but ex-KGB heavies haven’t come knocking on the door yet, so he probably hasn’t read it. I occasionally lecture theoretical physics at university. The journey of the mind is the greatest journey of all. But sometimes the necessity to act cuts the journey short.