In Between Worlds with Peter Oliver Wolff

Name, age, where are you from, what format you like using, what are you currently working on if you are?

My name is Peter Oliver Wolff (*1989), I’m from Campinas, Brazil and currently living in Berlin, Germany. I mainly work digital, but enjoy working with film, video and text. Besides working for different magazines and clients in editorial, fashion, portrait and architecture I am currently working a lot on archiving, both digital and analog, trying to develop a system that allows me to find things faster and above all, making it easier to understand and reflect the body of work I built in 10 years as a professional photographer. Additionally I‘ve been experimenting with light and still-life in my studio and trying to understand different setups.

What about your surroundings/environments and upbringing interested you?

Growing up in Brazil with its warmth in all aspects and then moving to a very small town in the Southern Black Forest Germany filled my childhood and youth with longing and the search for identity. I spent a lot of time both in nature and the internet, connecting with like-minded people regarding music, art and photography. Vacations to Italy, France, the U.K. and back to Brazil to visit my grandparents were definitely a highlight as a child, never wanting to go back home.

When was the first time you met photography? How did you feel when you met it?

My German grandmother gave me a 35mm camera as a present when I was 10 or 11, since then I knew that this will be always be part of my life as I enjoyed documenting everything I did so much. Playing with my friends, what I ate on vaca- tion, what I built with Lego and later taking pictures of my friends and me skating, which also influenced me a lot regarding music and graphic design.

Tell us about current projects you have been working on (could be any, or just work you have been doing in general). Is this story inspired out of personal reasons, or others? What are you most excited about in these projects?

I have two personal projects that I‘m working on, both of them have to do with identity. The first one is a project that I shot in 2015 as a diploma project for my degree in visual communication.Trying to combine the two worlds I grew up in I searched for a German city in Brazil and spent three months in a town called Nova Petrópolis, documenting the life, landscapes and people. Speaking both languages but having no relationship to this area made it both personal but still distant enough. What struck me the most was the awkward mixture between German and Brazilian tradition and the search for identity, both in the opposite of how I understood it and was educated. Currently I am working on a book with two designers to make it accessible to a wider crowd, since I just released five books as a part of my diploma.

I‘m currently in the research and planning mode for the second project. This one is much more personal, since I will visit certain places where I experienced either a trauma or bad moments that accompanied me for a few years in my life. Already visiting one of these places and taking a few pictures made me curious of overcoming fears through photography.

How did you find your visual literacy? Why are you attracted to certain images more than others?

Sometimes I look back at pictures that I took in my exchange semester in Jerusalem in 2013 and see certain colors, surfaces and moments that I still love so much. I think that I really learnt to see and to be present at that time. But also consuming and buying a lot of fashion magazines and photography books, looking at layouts, smelling the paper, listening to music and writing down favorite parts of the lyrics is a big influence for me.

Imagine meeting someone who is picking up a camera for the first time. What do you tell them?

Learn how light works and have cool friends :-)