Alles kann, nichts muss examines in images and texts the phenomena of the swinger scence and of “private pornography”. Swingers are singles and couples who engage in sexual contacts with other partners in mutual agreement.
Holger Salach visited people who organize sex parties at home or in clubs and took pictures of them. Between voyeurism and exhibitionism, photography became an instrument capable of satisfying sexual and visual expectations. In addition, he documented his travels and his research into this world of private desires—the interiors of the apartments, the views out of their windows, images of highways. The photographs do not merely show bare skin, but also feelings, moments of tenderness, and thus counter the cliché of a merely miserable and decadent world of debased eroticism. Interspersed in between the images is the photographer’s e-mail correspondence with the subjects of his photographs, an additional element that irritatingly refracts and reflects the pornographic representations.
Alles kann, nichts muss describes a tightrope walk from a photographic perspective that shows something new beyond and beneath the ordinary, even if it occasionally allows for a glimpse of sexual organ.