“Church Reflections” is an ongoing photographic series started in 2022, for which I have visited all of the approximately 1000 churches and chapels in the Austrian state of Carinthia, to capture reflections in their windows, which, due to their transparency, naturally merge with the sacral interiors.

It is important to clarify that this series follows a documentary approach. All images are real photographs, depicting real scenes. The mixture of the outside with the inside is not the result of digital manipulation. It is a naturally occurring effect, documented by photographing through the reflecting window glass of the churches/chapels into their interiors.

The technical process consists of taking a two-axis panoramic image of the scene whenever a wider field of view is required, while taking multiple shots from marginally different positions when photographing straight through the glass, allowing my own reflection to remain hidden when the images are combined.

The photo material collected in the course of this series is still being processed step by step into final photographs. A very time-consuming task, due to all the complex panoramas in need of being manually assembled. By now, the series consists of 54 photographs and is expected to ultimately grow to 100.

Within this body of work, "Church Reflection No. 1" holds a special place. It is the first photograph of the series which I unexpectedly captured at a chapel close to where I used to live. It sparked my interest in reflections of this kind and consequently led to the Church Reflections project. Unlike the others, Reflection No. 1 introduces additional thematic recurring elements, such as the depicted bird, which had by coincidence temporarily trapped itself inside, and the custom picture frame that emerges from the window frame. (Detail images are shown on the starting page.)

Finally, it should be noted that I feel most comfortable knowing these pictures to be exposed to their ambiguity, without giving their interpretation a personal tendency.