"For several years I had tried everything possible to flee the small Bavarian town I grew up in, eventually ending up in Moscow at the age of twenty. After spending more than a year there trying, unsuccessfully, to get my act together as a photographer - studying Russian and photographing pretty much everything I came across without a specific story or clue - I discovered the Caucasus. It was love at first sight.

In the spring of 1993, I decided to try to live in Tbilisi for a few months before going to university at the end of the summer. It was in this time I began to discover the cultures...