Most people know Mischa Fanghaenel as one of the towering, impassive bouncers — intimidating despite his penchant for bib overalls and colorful sneakers — at Berghain in Berlin, arguably the most famous techno club in the world.
But his reputation as an artist is growing, with a show coming up at Fotografiska Berlin next year, and interest in the German city’s club culture running as high as the BPMs inside Berghain, which is marking its 20th anniversary this year with a New Year’s Eve blowout.
Fanghaenel is prized for his unvarnished-yet-sensitive portraits of Berghain regulars, the bulk of them taken in 2022 as the world was gingerly emerging from the pandemic, and his dreamy “blurred” series, lensed at night during walks in his favorite cities and revealing new facets of well-known landmarks — or overlooked visual poetry in the urban landscape.
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“Just getting a bit out of focus, you see something different. You see emotion. At least I do,” Fanghaenel relates over Google Meet. A pensive and soft-spoken man who worships at the altar of Yousuf Karsh, he likens his after-dark compositions, lensed with a Fuji digital camera, to “painting with light.”
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And with black, for there’s a velvety quality to his photos, which he prints on aluminum. The metal doesn’t register white, leaving portions of his images blank and shiny, adding additional depth and intrigue.
“If we would sit together on a sofa just a meter or two apart from each other, and look at one picture, we would see a different picture because of the way the light is reflected,” he says, adding: “I always loved the contrast between light and dark.”
While he might seem like a new kid on the art block, Fanghaenel has been taking pictures seriously for at least 20 years, earning money mostly from commercial portraiture. Finally, after years of encouragement from his wife Helene, he exhibited six blurred works at a Berlin gallery in 2017, selling four right off the bat.
“I thought, ‘OK, this is something I should take more seriously,'” he recalls.
Fanghaenel had initiated the blurred series in 2008 while walking around late one night in Istanbul, and he’s done the same in New York City, Paris, Stockholm and Moscow, where he was born, moving with his family to Berlin as an infant.
These images, sometimes employing the bokeh effect to the extreme, are drenched with intrigue, and Fanghaenel delights in observing people’s reactions when they finally figure out what they’re looking at. For example, a Parisian puzzled by diagonal grids of pink light was charmed to learn that he was in fact gazing at the Centre Pompidou.
Fanghaenel mentions the nondescript Park Inn hotel that was built on Alexanderplatz about 40 years ago. “Everybody says it’s ugly, and I made a picture of it, and nobody recognizes it,” he says. “But if I say the name of the hotel, everybody knows, but nobody saw it like I pictured it. And this is what I love.”
Fanghaenel does some post-production on his images, but takes fewer frames than you might imagine, using the white balance and other technical possibilities of the camera to arrive at an image that moves him.
According to the technical rules of photography, everything about his streetscapes are wrong. “They are out of focus, the light is wrong and the colors are usually wrong,” he says, noting he couldn’t resist rendering Manhattan’s urban canyons in green, orange or purple.
Yet these images are compelling, original and romantic to the core, for Fanghaenel searches for beauty in his surroundings, and always manages to find it.
It was a fascination with his newborn baby brother Johannes, 12 years his junior, that compelled him to start playing with his father’s cameras and lenses. “I was just drawn to this very innocent, beautiful human being,” he says. “I wanted to be able to show him when he grew up how pretty he was. I just felt it needed to be captured.”
He soon became the official photographer for his extended family, encouraged by artistic relatives on his mother’s side who realized he had an eye. Fanghaenel would go on to study photography in Düsseldorf, though he never completed his degree. Indeed, he set aside his cameras for a few years amid “personal issues,” and took up bouncing at Berlin clubs, which he discovered he also relished.
Since joining Berghain’s formidable door crew in 2010, he felt he needed to capture the people who regularly converge on this club, nearly as famous for its no-photo policy and darkroom shenanigans as for its uncompromising commitment to an austere, yet intense strain of techno.
Asked how he accounts for the longevity of the club, Fanghaenel replies: “They stayed true to that idea of freedom and privacy.”
Recently, on a night off, he took in a set by DJ Lag, who hails from South Africa, and was impressed anew how Berghain still upholds the highest standards of music and sound quality, “combining it with the idea of people just being themselves. It’s too amazing.”
Before Berghain, Fanghaenel worked as a bouncer at Bar 25 and Weekend, in addition to many “special interest parties,” his coded language for gay or fetish events.
In his estimation, he “grew up a lot working at the door,” realizing he was doing an important job in protecting spaces where people of various orientations could let go and be themselves. “I’m enabling something beautiful. This is what changed me,” he says.
Indeed, his biggest reward is “the smile of the people when they leave the club.”
Fanghaenel is not the first Berghain employee to achieve renown with creative projects. Fellow bouncer Sven Marquardt is also a noted photographer and something of an underground fashion icon, having posed for Max Kobosil’s 44 Label Group, lensed fashion campaigns, and collaborated with Hugo Boss.
Asked if his line of work represents a good training ground for photography, Fanghaenel replies: “I hope so.…It helps a lot to actually see people,” he says. “I always see the person and not so much the clothing.”
Fanghaenel has already racked up about 180 portraits of Berghain devotees, and he hopes to publish a book once he reaches 200, liking that round number. “I want to show the beauty of Berlin club culture to the world,” he says. “This is an idea of how everybody can come together.”