Pavlov's Children, 2024
On a recent trip to Berlin, I visited the school where I began my teaching career. In the summer of 1989, I was abruptly transferred to another school. I hadn’t set foot in that building for 35 years. Revisiting it, I struggled to recall the routines that once structured daily life, but the schoolyard brought back vivid memories. I remembered the final flag ceremony in July 1989—an event designed to instil socialist ideology. As students stood in formation awaiting announcements, they suddenly raised handmade posters and shouted in unison, demanding that I stay. They knew I had been forced to leave. Their defiance moved me deeply. Four months later, everything changed—the Berlin Wall fell.
Eight years later, I read my Stasi file and discovered the reason for my sudden reassignment: a final report had declared me “unsuitable” for teaching. This revelation led me to revisit my photographic archive from that time. I found over 15 rolls of black-and-white film—hundreds of portraits of my students taken in the final weeks before my dismissal.
Pavlov’s Children explores how individuals, especially children, are conditioned by their environment, education, and social systems. The title references Ivan Pavlov’s research on classical conditioning, reflecting the methods used by the GDR to shape young minds. Each portrait is treated as an archival artefact. The negatives are encased in resin, a process that distorts and transforms them. Each mould is handcrafted and unique, mirroring how memory, identity, and history are shaped, altered, and sometimes obscured by time and ideology.
Close-up photographs of the resin pieces are printed on 10 × 8-inch black-and-white matte paper. The prints, arranged in a grid, range from 36 to over 120, evoking the standardised experience of state-controlled education, where individuality was secondary to ideological conformity. Yet the subtle variations in each resin mould reveal traces of personal identity within a rigid system.
Through this work, I honour my former students while reflecting on the lasting impact of an educational system designed to condition rather than cultivate.

Eight years later, I read my Stasi file and discovered the reason for my sudden reassignment: a final report had declared me “unsuitable” for teaching. This revelation led me to revisit my photographic archive from that time. I found over 15 rolls of black-and-white film—hundreds of portraits of my students taken in the final weeks before my dismissal.
Pavlov’s Children explores how individuals, especially children, are conditioned by their environment, education, and social systems. The title references Ivan Pavlov’s research on classical conditioning, reflecting the methods used by the GDR to shape young minds. Each portrait is treated as an archival artefact. The negatives are encased in resin, a process that distorts and transforms them. Each mould is handcrafted and unique, mirroring how memory, identity, and history are shaped, altered, and sometimes obscured by time and ideology.
Close-up photographs of the resin pieces are printed on 10 × 8-inch black-and-white matte paper. The prints, arranged in a grid, range from 36 to over 120, evoking the standardised experience of state-controlled education, where individuality was secondary to ideological conformity. Yet the subtle variations in each resin mould reveal traces of personal identity within a rigid system.
Through this work, I honour my former students while reflecting on the lasting impact of an educational system designed to condition rather than cultivate.
