ALEXANDER VON REISWITZ | CATCHING STRANGERS – THE FAMILY CONSTELLATION PROJECT

Berlin book premiere

The starting point is an international photography and literature project by Alexander von Reiswitz, which was created over more than 15 years in over 20 countries and in which strangers who happened to be in the same place at the same time are staged as families for a moment. The analog black-and-white family portraits do not see photography as documentation, but as a setting and pose questions about the construction of reality and the power of human attribution.

The special thing about Catching Strangers is the close interweaving of image and language. Twenty-three renowned authors have taken up the photographic models and inscribed fictional biographies on them. Photography and literature meet here as equal forms of world creation. The texts do not explain the images, but create their own parallel narrative worlds in which the photography asserts something and the text contradicts it. The result is a tense relationship between photographic setting and literary imagination that goes far beyond mere illustration.

Some of the themes in the stories are quite mundane: in the case of the author Mariana Leky, celebrated for her eloquent prose, the photograph is the last one taken of the Japanese father of the family at the age of 102. The slightly whimsical mood that we know from Leky's novels can also be found in this short, warm-hearted story about the inexorable end of an old man. Berlin novelist Ulla Lenze, on the other hand, has turned her story into a little fairy tale, a counter-model to the insatiable Ilsebill in "The Fisherman and His Wife". A fisherman who loves fish and a woman, but she only loves him and no fish.

On June 6, 2026, the Berlin book premiere of Catching Strangers - The Family Constellation Project will takeplace in the Roter Salon of the Volksbühne Berlin as part of Parole Text:Buch . The evening transforms the principle of the illustrated book into a unique stage form and does not follow a linear narrative. It approaches what we call reality - tentatively, without a safety net. The participating authors read their texts themselves on this evening. For a moment, the world seems to come closer: voices from different literary perspectives meet images that defy classification. Brief real-life observations and anecdotes from the process of creating the photographs and the encounters with their random protagonists allow something of the truth and veracity of these moments to shine through. Sound opens up the spaces in between.

With Felicitas Hoppe, Ulrike Draesner, Mariana Leky, Nicol Ljubić, Ulla Lenze, Anna Katharina Hahn, Verena Jütte, Marjana Gaponenko and Christian Stahlhut, among others. The evening opens with a text written especially for Catching Strangers by John Burnside, read by his long-time translator Bernhard Robben.

Sound: Matthias Millhoff
Concept and photography: Alexander von Reiswitz