Many times, mostly on Sundays between 1994 and 2008, the photographer Lillian Birnbaum visited the poet Peter Handke in his house near Paris to take portraits of him on various occasions. First casually, then purposefully, she turned her attention to the scattered things in the house and garden, arranged in a mysterious order: feathers, stones, notebooks, nuts, postcards, mushrooms, pencils, coins and much more. The idea arose to attempt a different kind of portrait from these small installations: without the poet, as if he were present in the things in a hidden way.

Lillian Birnbaum, * in New York, grew up in Vienna, lives mainly in Paris. Works as a photographer for European and American magazines and as an artistic consultant and producer for international film projects.