JONATHAN CHERRY: What did you have for breakfast today?

CHRISTIAN REISTER: Coffee & cigarettes. I usually don’t start eating until lunchtime.

JC: Any emerging photographers inspiring your practice at the moment?

CR: Many. I find them on the internet or in magazines more often than in exhibitions. And some are good friends of mine. I am constantly in touch with Thomas Lobenwein or Fred Hüning, for example. Even when our photographic approach is quite different, honest and critical discussions about each other’s work is always inspiring. Through my project FENSTER 61, a shop window exhibition place in Berlin, I get to know new photographers with new approaches. This also enrichens my work.

JC: What is your current project all about?

CR: At the moment I am completing my book ‘ALEX’ that I will publish to coincide with an exhibition of the 4th European Month of Photography in Berlin. Choosing photos, deciding their order, designing … all brainwork that unfortunately takes place in enclosed spaces. The photos in the book were taken on Alexanderplatz in Berlin since the summer 2008.

JC: Any exciting plans for the rest of 2010?

CR: When the book and the exibition are finished I want to go back out into the streets, taking pictures spontaneously without thinking too much. I get ideas by doing, not by thinking. I wouldn’t mind spending the next two or three years without a concrete plan or an exhibition date just doing what is most important to me – long walks with a camera in my hands.

JC: In your opinion what makes a successful portrait?

CR: It should ask questions. It should show you something or someone you haven’t seen that way before. That’s what photography in general should do.

JC: Take us through your approach to photographing strangers?

CR: I think that the main part of my work as a photographer follows the tradition of classical street photography – I like it because it is intuative and depends on the the situation that I find at the place. It has a lot to do with chance, luck and spontaneous reaction if you neither communicate with the people you are photographing nor manipulate the scene in any way. It took some years before I could walk the streets with a relaxed attitude and even take close-ups of complete strangers. I have developed methodes and ways of doing this without disturbing people or getting on their nerves – usually, they don’t even realise what is happening. This sort of photography is rather erratic and months can pass before you get the next good picture. When it works, though, you get pictures that you couldn’t have imagined beforehand. I like my pictures to surprise me. I’m not a photographer who composes pictures in his head before he sets them up.

JC: What does photography mean to you?

CR: Photography came started for me ten years ago and has become an integral part of my life. Very seldom do I go out without a camera. I don’t earn my living by taking photographs – a fact that gives me a lot of space. Photos don’t have to come about, they may. That’s very important to me. In that way it can simply be a creative medium. No more and no less.

JC: Any words of wisdom to recent photography graduates?

CR: I’m an autodidact. Sometimes I get the feeling that students of photography think too much about their careers and intellectual concepts and neglect photography. In this case my advice is: relax, be independent, use your intuition. But of course there are many young photographers who are much cleverer than me and who don’t need my ‘words of wisdom’.

JC: Any other thoughts?

CR: A lot.