‘I am inspired by very bad German documentary images’: the best photograph of Peter Bialobrzeski

me clearly remember the day this picture was taken. It was 26 December 2004. I was driving to Bavaria to take photos after spending Christmas with my then-girlfriend and my mother, and it was snowing. I saw these people standing on the hill and thought it might be interesting. I set up my large format camera, stood in the same place for about two hours and took four frames – large format film is expensive and sometimes you have to wait a long time for it to be perfect. Although, what is perfect is very subjective of course. For me, it is when an image feels a possibility. Another frame of the four became the cover of my Heimat book. About 13 years ago, I also made an edition of this shot, which has the same kind of feeling. So this one is my second favorite shot.

The feeling I get when I look at an image is completely different from the feelings when I’m shooting. I was standing there waiting for the scene, freezing, worried I’d get a snowflake on the lens. I was wearing gloves which make it difficult to operate the camera. Shooting is a process of total concentration, like meditation – you can’t think about anything else. It’s like when you play table tennis: you’re not thinking about winning or what it feels like to win, it’s just the next ball that matters.

My work is project based – I know how far I can go with just one visual idea. My previous project was about Asian megacities, but then I became professor of photography in Bremen and I couldn’t escape so easily. So the challenge was to make something in Germany that was beautiful without being critical of beauty, and that’s what a lot of photographers were doing at that time. I spent two years traveling to spots in the mountains and by the sea, taking images with my camera in the same way painters would take their landscapes with a camera obscura.

I am inspired by very bad German documentary images, and by Flemish and British landscape painters, but I wanted to do something intelligent that also allows a sense of beauty, like the American photographers Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld. The concept of this image is not far from Constable – depicting modern creatures in the landscape – except that no one is working here, they are going on holiday. The red Gore-Tex jackets are not something you want to see when looking for a beautiful view of the landscape – but without them the image would be boring. That’s the dialect behind it.

I have published 23 City Diaries, from Belfast to Bangkok. They have a certain quality that’s hard to describe – some people might find them good but I think they’re also funny. I have a classical approach to composing the landscape: it is an idea of ​​how the city space feels and how it relates to you emotionally when you look at it – like Daguerre’s photograph of the shoemaker and his customer on Rue du Temple in Paris.

Photography is my way of negotiating with the outside world in order not to go mad. It has nothing to do with escape, it’s more to do with trying to bring things together in my head to make a visual commentary – to study the possibilities in the outside world.

Peter Bialobrzeski’s CV

Born: Wolfsburg, Germany, 1961
trained: Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen; London College of Printing
Influences: “US and British color photographers such as Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Mitch Epstein, Paul Graham, Tom Wood, Martin Parr and Jem Southam. Landscape painters including Caspar David Friedrich and William Turner”
High point: “To be able to see the world at the expense of others; meet like-minded photographers at festivals and exhibitions”
Low point: “Be frustrated because your mind and thoughts are always three steps ahead of your creative abilities and skills.”
Top tip: “Keep going even though you know you’ll never get there. It’s fun to be on the road”