You can tell stories with photographs – but of course also with texts. And so writing is not entirely foreign to me either.
Jürgen Meister, painter, sculptor, gallery owner, long-time friend and constant source of inspiration, described this connection between photography and literature in my work in his newsletter as follows:
“Marcus Metzner’s often graphic-looking photographs play with visual habits, question familiar perspectives and pose questions about the relationship between pictorial elements, surfaces, forms and colours. Superficial trivialities become motifs that are worthy of a picture, and works emerge that track down a secret side, hidden essential features of places and situations. Although almost never explicitly shown, people also play an important role in the photographs; possible stories and secrets are hidden everywhere. Who lives behind that window? What is happening there? And what am I seeing here at all? Is this real? Such a reading then also makes it plausible that Marcus Metzner also writes. Mostly short stories in which the unexpected and absurd intrude into everyday life and turn life upside down.”
After I was nominated for the German Short Crime Story Prize 2022 – next to the Glauser Prize the most important award for this genre in the German-speaking world – the idea arose to hold a reading performance as part of my exhibition in the Grevenbroich Versandhalle under the title “Bad Stories”. A beautiful evening – full house, lots of fun and plenty of applause!
German Crime Short Story Award 2022
The fact that I was then actually awarded first prize in the German Short Crime Story Award 2022 of course makes me very happy. If you would like to read my award-winning story “Dein Freund, der Postbote” (Your friend, the postman) and discover many more stories by a wide variety of authors: The anthology “Tatort Eifel 8” has just been published by KBV-Verlag!
Final gala and award ceremony at the crime fiction festival “Tatort Eifel”! Many thanks to actress Katharina Wackernagel for the wonderful laudatory speech and to the jury consisting of crime novelist and 3SAT TV culture editor Martin Schöne, Rowohlt Publishers editor Nina Grabe and crime novelist and “Wilsberg” creator Jürgen Kehrer!