Me, in the Image. / Todtnauberg, 1:1

:Todtnauberg.

The series. The place. The hut. The words that never came.
(July ’49 — Celan meets Heidegger. A poem remains. A sentence is missing.)

I come from there. Or from nearby. So: not innocent.
The forest Heidegger gazed upon — I breathed it.
Not by choice. By origin.

The photo: not a pose.
But a stance. An attitude — in the flesh.
The gaze? — not a gaze, a counter-gaze.
(No, I’m not looking at you. I’m going through you. Until you look away.)

The image is rough, grainy. Like History under the nails.
Like shame, enlarged.

I put myself in the image —
not to be seen. But not to flee.
The place demands it.
The shadow of Todtnauberg: it’s not the weather.

Whoever can — let them look. Whoever cannot — let them turn away.

But one thing remains:
There is someone standing. And he remains standing.

To stand within the image: Matthias Koch in Todtnauberg.

In a short poem entitled Me, in the image. / Todtnauberg, 1:1, Matthias Koch questions the very act of representation. But this is neither a narcissistic self-portrait nor a search for identity. It is a gesture of presence, a refusal to flee. A way of responding to a place — Todtnauberg — whose history exceeds the boundaries of landscape.

The photograph is not there to seduce: it is raw, grainy, harsh like buried memory. Koch exposes himself without evasion: Me — frontal, naked. Without alibi. The photographer becomes both subject and device: he places himself within the image as one places oneself in a field of tension. Not to be seen, but to take a position. It’s not about looking — but traversing, and being traversed.

Todtnauberg — the name cracks like a boundary marker. A place where, in July 1949, Paul Celan met Martin Heidegger in the philosopher’s hut. A failed encounter, where words could not bridge the chasm. Celan’s poem Todtnauberg remains charged with the expectation of a word — that never came.
Matthias Koch states: I come from there. Or from nearby. So: not innocent.
The confession is clear: the territory photographed is also a territory of origin. It carries collective memory, inherited discomfort, a silence that can no longer be ignored.

This is not a staged image. It is a stance — an attitude in the flesh.
Koch does not represent himself: he stands. And he holds.
His gaze is not directed toward the other, but turned back: I don’t look at you. I go through you.
The image becomes a challenge: Whoever can — let them look. Whoever cannot — let them turn away.

In this unflinching confrontation, photography becomes a space of responsibility.
A space not for being seen, but for not backing down.
Koch stands, not to figure, but to answer the shadow of the place.
This shadow is not atmosphere. It is a moral demand.

There is something essential here, in this way of inhabiting the image:
a refusal of comfort, a confrontation with what does not pass —
with what history leaves beneath the nails, like indelible ash.