The title sounds like something off a self-help shelf, but it functions more like an incantation: Dreams and How to Keep Them. How do you hold onto something that’s fleeting by definition—a high, a night, a city that spits you out and lets you back in exactly when it feels like it?
It’s been ten years since Vincent Wechselberger left a hundred-person village in the Austrian district of St. Pölten for Berlin: 18 years old, alone, fleeing compulsory military service and a narrowness that had him gasping for air. What followed was a degree at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie and a second, informal education in the capital’s nightlife, one that eventually produced his first photobook, Ready: a portrait of queer sex work shot from lived experience, since Wechselberger has worked in the trade himself, part-time, ever since he arrived. Dreams and How to Keep Them, his second photobook, is in a sense the continuation of that self-interrogation, only cast wider.
Wechselberger shows naked bodies in hotel rooms, kisses in various locations, friends on dancefloors and after festivals, himself in the bathroom mirror. But also his father reading in Paris, his mother in bed, Berlin rooftops in evening light, a sunrise behind curtains, trees in Kyiv, a figure dancing through Berlin snow. Excess and everyday life, sex and family, night and morning all stand on equal footing. The archive isn’t a greatest-hits reel—it’s more a ten-year sediment of whatever stuck.
And what about the dreams in the title? Wechselberger can’t hold onto those either—at best, their residue: a face you once loved, the light after a long night, a body, an apartment, a version of yourself. In that sense, the title is almost a trick. Then again, maybe we should just forget them, not even try to hold on. Dreams are famously unreliable companions anyway.