December 17, 2010 – January 2, 2011. Almost exactly one year ago my brother and I planned a trip to Munich to pick up our friends Natalie and Tom, who came from Washington, DC and landed on the 17th. We wanted to go back to our hometown Bolzano together. In addition to that or maybe primarily I wanted to meet this girl Nadja, who lived in Munich. She had written me a message about how she liked my music via MySpace years ago, but we didn’t really stay in touch back then. This fall she stumbled over her MySpace message, googled my name and wrote me on Facebook. We communicated for some time and decided to meet eventually. As my friends told me they were coming over Christmas I kinda decided to kill two birds with one stone. Before we started in Vienna we had all kinds of problems with our car as it was so cold, we needed assistance two days in a row to have our car start. Then it took as seven hours to get to Munich because all kind of stuff happened to us on the road. We met with Nat and Tom, had dinner and went to the bar this girl I hadn’t met before was at (just in time as we were so late and she was ready to leave). We all spent a great night together. The day after Tom, Nat, Lukas and I met again and went home for the holidays. I got sick (just like now) and I started to miss Nadja, so I decided to see her again asap. I went back to Munich on the 28th, we spent New Years together and these are some of the pictures that document this period of time that I cherish so much. Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.

December 22 – December 27, 2010. Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. This time when I went home for Christmas I didn’t really make many pictures as it felt like I’d shot everything before anyway, so. But this one day we went up a mountain to bring my brother to a business meeting and while he was there, Fabi, Sabine and I went to this lake. Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.

October 4 – October 7, 2010. Längenfeld, Austria. We’ve had this tradition for a few years now: My parents treat me and my brother to some days in a SPA hotel every fall, so that we have some family time away from home once a year. We’re usually going to a place somewhere in the middle between Vienna, Austria and Bolzano, Italy. I just found these pictures so I thought I’d upload them. Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.

January 28 – Januar 30, 2011. Morgnaga di Gardone Riviera, Italy. I had a meeting with the band Bilderbuch on Wednesday, January 15th, if I recall correctly. I had known the band for some months, we met each other at live shows and the singer Maurice and I had gone out together two or three times when he called me to ask, if I wanted to do the photos and artwork for their new album. The night before I had the meeting with Bilderbuch and the label, I went to Maurice‘ place to listen to the album for the first time. I was pretty hammered when I arrived at his place and he played the record at a really high level on some crappy speakers in his huge living room. We listened to this loud music for 40 minutes or so and I got kinda dizzy as a result of the intense music, the volume and the alcohol. The first thing I thought was that I wanted to do something really calm and peaceful with the photos and artwork as it was all so hectic and brutal somehow (in a good way though).

I had lost my license a few weeks earlier and planned on going to Italy to renew that eventually. That’s when I thought about the lake of Garda (that’s kinda close to my hometown) and its beautiful west side that isn’t quite as famous as the east side as it doesn’t have as many beaches to easily go into the water. It’s mostly big rocks. Anyways, we had this meeting, I told them my idea about driving to the lake of Garda (also that they would have to drive m car as I didn’t have a license), they were down for the road trip and we started a week later on Friday at 6 p.m. We had three extremely intense days, a combination of almost no sleep and working all day. On Saturday night we celebrated our last night (which was actually also the second night, but well) in the beautiful apartment on a hill right by the lake and decided to shoot a music video to their song „Venezianischer Spiegel“ after we had dropped the previous video idea.We started working right away, it was 3 a.m. It was a weird night as we had to do the whole thing over and over again (it was a one-shot), I started to think that there was a man watching us in the trees close to the place we were filming at, Peter was sure that he had heard a wolf right next to him and yeah…

Some hours later we got up , shot for some more hours, had dinner with my parents in Bolzano and drove back to Vienna, which took us almost all night. When we arrived we took some more pictures and went for another drink. After that we saw each other almost ever day and night as the deadline was so close and I still had to do the artwork, the press photo selection and editing, some other design stuff and the video. It was a very intense and extremely special time for me. If you wanna see the video, look it up on YouTube (Bilderbuch – Venezianischer Spiegel), some press pictures are on my Flickr, on my website and on the website of their label (inkmusic.at). Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.

January 10th – January 15th, 2011. Berlin. I went to Berlin to start recording a new album for my project Chris And The Other Girls. I first met Nikolai Potthoff in September ’10, he liked my stuff so we decided to work together. We got along very well, it was a really intense, but amazing week. We basically spent five whole days in the studio doing nothing but listening to music, playing, trying, recording… These are some of the pictures I took. The others look pretty much the same, so… Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.

September 17th – November 6th, 2010. Vienna, Austria – Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. It’s hard to get back to this thing after such a long time. I usually just traveled somewhere, did something and posted photos of my little adventures. At some point I got bored by this concept as I thought all photos kinda looked the same anyway. So I didn’t even plan on not posting stuff anymore or taking a break, I just didn’t think anything was relevant enough to post it as I always wanted do something special and worth following. I tried to find new ways of making series or photo sets: I figured it might be nice to always just post one picture and tell the story behind it as I reckon there are really nice stories to some of the photos. Then I thought about just posting behind the scene pictures of jobs I do, but as I wasn’t convinced by that idea either I’m just going back to my little Hossamadonna diary for now.

So where was I? Right, what I wanted to tell you: Katherine Squier and her friend Matt traveled through Europe in September and October of 2010. I have known Katherine for quite some time as we’ve been Flickr friends for over two years. We had never seen each other though, so we decided to meet when she traveled through Vienna, Austria. They stayed in our apartment for some days and as we got along so well (we being my brother Lukas, Matt, Katherine and me) that we decided to take them back home to Italy with us (as we had to go home for a cousins reunion and they planned on going to Zürich, Switzerland after Vienna). We spent 24 hours/day together for almost a week and it almost felt like family after such short time. We traveled together, ate together, went to concerts and parties together, drank together, danced together… After our short stay in Bolzano/Bozen we brought them to the train station in Innsbruck, went back to Vienna while they were traveling to Zürich, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and so on. When it was time for them to take their flight back to the States Katherine wasn’t ready to leave Europe yet so we decided that she’d come back to Vienna for some more time. The pictures I’m posting now are very important to me as it was such a nice and intense time for all of us. It’s basically just random shots I did during Matt & Katherine’s stay in Vienna and Bolzano with us. Some of the photos are by Katherine Squier. Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.

September 9th – September 12th, 2010. Berlin. I spend some beautiful days in Berlin one month ago. I was going to Berlin to meet some friends from Hamburg and Berlin, see some friends from Vienna play at the Popkomm, go to the Berlin Festival and to a Stars concert. It was all a bit chaotic, but that’s probably what made it special. Here are some pictures. Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.

August 16 – August 20, 2010. Copenhagen – Malmö. So we went to København one month ago.These are the pictures. Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.

August 7 – August 12, 2010. Vienna – Bolzano/Bozen – Vienna. I had to go home to dget something done with the car and… well anyways, I had a good time. Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.