Claude Peschel Dutombe 1

Claude grew up behind the cold war iron curtain, specifically East Berlin.
He left his enclosed home country at an early age of 19 and has been roaming the world ever since. He now lives and works in South East Asia for more than 15 years.

When asked if his photographic work is related to the circumstances he grew up with his response was this:

"As an artist I want to create an overall body of work of someone who walked out of his childhood home, slid down the rabbit hole and never ceased to stumble around wondering and exploring with his mouth wide open.
I have no interest in reporting back the realities of my exploratory territories but rather pick fragmented bits and pieces to create my own tunes that I can dance to and perform for others.
Tunes that tell stories of the otherness, disparity and mystery of places far away from home.
Stories that ignite curiosity rather than educate, stories that will pull YOU down the rabbit hole and make you want to follow me..."

The series "Dreams of a Distance Place" is the center piece of his work that often relates to other topics he works on.

As he describes it is an attempt to reconstruct the visuals of his childhood dreams. To remember what he imagined to be out there in the great big world when he was first bitten by (a politically suppressed) wanderlust.
Claude then would daydream of all the far away and mysterious places that people of the Eastern bloc were not permitted to visit. The longing for discovery was expressed clearly through the long hours he spent with his postcard, coin and record collections from all corners of the globe. He also filled his time reading books about places that he hoped to one day be able to see with his own eyes.

The photographs in "Dreams of a Distance Place" depict foreign, exotic-looking places, but they are intentionally missing factual definitions, captions etc. They are meant to represent a boy’s imagination of places he has never been to.
The dream sequences vary widely in tonality and subject—due to the erratic nature of boyhood dreams—but the format of triptychs (on instant film) holds them together as a unified body of work. While each triptych stands by itself as a dream sequence, some of them have two "siblings," with which they can be combined, forming "ninetychs" that nod towards even more complex dreams.