FROM THE BOOK
"Olaf Heine, born and raised near Hanover, says, 'I’m a small town boy.' When his hometown became too small for his ambition and dreams, he first moved to Berlin, then to Los Angeles for a decade. 'Ignoring conventions, traveling around the world, touching base with different spheres. Sometimes a mattress on the floor, sometimes a five-star suite,' is how he describes his life. That, not coincidentally, sounds like the rock 'n' roll legend. In his own life, but also in his work, he has come very close to that legend… Of course the title, and actually the whole book, can be seen as autobiographical. Most of the pictures were not taken during photo shoots, when, often because of lack of time, a very obvious staging is used. Heine does that, too, as can be seen in his book,
Leaving the Comfort Zone, which he calls a kind of 'greatest hits album of my work.' To extend the metaphor,
I Love You but I’ve Chosen Rock is the 'Olaf Heine Unplugged' album: more intimate, more documentarian, and more emotional. It is strewn with cable, tapes, and the rest of the less glamorous hardware of a musician’s life, as well as contact sheets, Polaroids, city views and journals, in which Heine has assembled backstage passes, business cards, boarding passes, and travel memorabilia into a visual diary and studio report. His new book offers the viewer insight without revealing the secret."
Adriano Sack, excerpted from Olaf Heine: I Love You but I’ve Chosen Rock.
