“Claus Stumbles” is a 34-part photographic series about stumbling as a fragile form of the present. A man in a beige coat moves through urban cityscapes without a clearly defined destination or origin. The figure remains deliberately elusive – a surface for projection between everyday life, deviation, and staging. The photographs are created through a direct encounter between body, light, and architecture in public space. Using short exposure times, the camera captures fractions of a second in which balance tips: steps intersect, axes of the body break, the coat lifts away from stability. Between contemporary choreography and photographic slapstick, a movement unfolds that is at once precise and slipping out of control. The strict geometry of the city amplifies the awkward, almost tragic poses of the figure, while hair, shadows, and fabric seem to acquire an agency of their own within the image.

At the centre lies the moment of near-fall: an unstable suspension between control and collapse in which no completed action is visible, but rather the fleeting emergence of a body in transition. Stumbling does not appear as failure, but as an attitude – a deliberate gesture of vulnerability and a quiet resistance against the staging of urban sovereignty. In deviating from linear movement, another form of presence emerges: open, precarious, and unpredictable.

The artist’s book comprises 88 pages and is structured into two image sections. Between them sits a separate text booklet that, when the book is opened, literally “stumbles” out of the binding, extending the fragile balance of the photographic series into the object itself. It includes texts by Dr. Anja Schürmann and Prof. Dr. Gerald Schröder, as well as a mockumentary-style interview with the fictional persona Claus, written by Valerie Schmidt.