When after a detour of 20 years I returned to making photographs in 2001, I picked up where I left off in the early 80s and where I had been walking through my old lessons and the advice of my teachers, and especially that of the sculptor [Michael Hall]: to aim for a “crisis”, as he put it to me, of form.

From 2003-9 I visited abandoned places and worked up spooky rooms as set pieces for feelings of fear. From 2010-17, I photographed fragments of walls and posters if my neighbors were leaving messages for each other. Since then I have been work at the edges of town, where the landscape has not yet been completely written over, and where I might the present built on the past.

My favorite place is where in 1936 the city police dumped the gypsies, hemmed in between open ditch sewers, a cemetery and railroad tracks, and where now one finds housing for students, the homeless, refugees, and a school for the circus and another for dogs.

I post current work on Instagram, and I can be reached by email.

Bruce Spear
Berlin, January 2026