The project takes shape from a simple and deeply personal need: to approach sport not merely as a physical, daily, transformative experience but as visual imagery. No longer just an aesthetic fascination, but a way one inhabits space, and the very perception of energy.

Apnea thus emerges as both a return and a deviation. A return to an origin rooted in the street, visual culture, subcultures, and spontaneous documentation; a detour toward a more constructed, more material territory, where movement is not simply photographed, but staged, contained, isolated. In this space, sport does not appear as pure performance, nor as athletic celebration. Rather, it becomes a form of restrained tension, a physical grammar made of strength, flexibility, posture, and silence.

We spoke with Hannes about the creation of this special project, exploring its underlying motivations and zooming in on his personal connection to his athletic muse: a story steeped in skateboarding culture, a world where movement was already a language, an identity, and a sense of belonging. Following that, a sporting microcosm which this Berlin-based photographer has rediscovered in recent years, through cycling and bouldering, in a more conscious way. 

Going back to the beginning of this editorial shoot, what was the first visual or emotional intuition behind the project? Was there a specific sport, movement, or feeling that started everything?

“Generally speaking, I think the project started from a very simple need: the personal desire to delve deeper into the sports.

Over the last five or six years, I’ve personally become much more involved in activities like cycling and bouldering. I’ve started to really enjoy working with my body again. When I was younger, I was very invested in skateboarding, snowboarding, and that kind of culture, but never in such a long-term, sustained way. Now I’m at a point in my life where I enjoy sport so much, and it has become a very important part of my everyday life. So the idea was to develop my visual work more in that direction as well.

Obviously, working in the marketing field, sport is still a growing market, but more than that, it’s a very exciting space. I think there is something deeply interesting about working with athletes, and with people who really use their bodies as part of their personal expression. That was the initial incentive.”

The visual story exists somewhere between sport, fashion, and studio experimentation. How did you define this new visual territory for the editorial shoot?

“I have a studio, so we started with a lot of mood references and quite quickly moved toward this idea of working with movement. Then I found VV, the person who stars in the editorial. She’s a trainer, but also a dancer, and I think she became the centerpiece of the whole story in a way. She holds the editorial together. She is the base of it.

I have to say, though, that there wasn’t a very strict direction from the beginning. It was a collaborative process. 

I realised that a lot of the project moves around the concept of breath, about holding the breath. But also about tension — holding it in the body and releasing it. VV is a strength and conditioning trainer, and she also works a lot with mobility and flexibility. So this idea of holding energy, holding thoughts, and creating space for those things became part of the project. But again, it was something that really came up during the process, rather than something we entered the shoot with as a fixed intention.”

How important is sport, intended as movement, in shaping your photographic narrative?

“I think it has been important from very early on. As I mentioned, I was skateboarding and snowboarding as a young teenager, and I think that kind of experience sets a path for many people. Later I  got into hardcore punk culture.Therewas always space to document, to create some kind of visual language around what was happening. A lot of people in Berlin who work in directing, photography, or visual arts come from a similar background.

Marek Lück, who was the director of photography on this project, is a very close friend of mine. I’ve known him for over 30 years, and he is still very much connected to skate culture. We both started around the same time, when we first got cameras and began shooting. So sports photography in a way was what kicked off our careers and now we’re slowly coming back to that.”

Sport and fashion often meet through garments. How did you approach the body as both athletic and fashionable?

“The shoot we made exists very much at that meeting point between sports and fashion. It’s something in between. Obviously the credit for the amazing styling to Ricarda Venjacob.. Right now, these worlds are colliding so intensely that it’s becoming harder and harder to separate them.

As I said earlier, Sport is probably one of the biggest visual and cultural markets right now. There’s so much technical fashion borrowing from outdoor sports, performance wear, and athletic codes. But I don’t think it was a fully conscious decision in that sense. It was more about picking pieces that belonged to the athletic world in some way — garments shaped in a specific manner, with some sense of functionality — but that were also visually strong and stylish. There were interesting color combinations, interesting shapes, and I think that exalted some really beautiful forms. It was about working with styling that could carry both elements: the physicality of sport and the sensibility of fashion.”

What would you like to express with this body of work?

“I think it’s really playful. As I said, there isn’t one very strong or rigid message behind it. It was much more about intuition, about selection, about responding to what was happening. We had a very complex mood board, with a lot of options and directions. But once you are on set with everyone, and everyone brings their craft into the room, it becomes very much about the moment. We had a great set designer, Sandro De Maruo, and a great crew. Everyone contributed something. So for me, the work expresses this sense of play, movement, and collaboration. It came from the combination of all these elements in the moment.”

Athleta Magazine is interested in sport not only as performance, but as culture, aesthetics, identity, and imagination. What does sport represent for you visually?

“I’m very interested in the aesthetic possibilities that are opening up right now. There is a sense that people are allowed to explore, to push things into interesting directions. For me, it has an energy that feels similar to fashion photography. I used to do quite a bit of fashion photography. I was never extremely successful in that world, or shooting for major magazines, but I feel like sport now has some of that same playful energy. You are allowed to try things. The field feels open, and that is very interesting to work with.

I also really like the whole process around the image. I always do a lot of work on paper as well. So even if I shoot digitally, as I did in this case, I print a lot, scan, cut, reinterpret the images, and work with different materials. I use whatever is at hand — watercolor, tape, cut-outs, printing on top of prints, printing on fabric. All of these things are possible within this visual realm, and I think that is really exciting. Sport, for me, becomes a field where you can experiment not only with bodies and movement, but also with materiality, texture, and image-making itself.”

Do you think arts, such as photography, can translate the invisible parts of movement — tension, effort, instinct, rhythm?

“Yes, certainly. I feel that the bigger a body of work is, the more it allows you to translate and express those invisible layers. And again, I think sport tells us a lot about society. It raises questions: what kinds of sports are people able to do? When can they do them? Where do they do them? Do they have access to space? Do they have the time, the environment, the freedom? So I think if you go somewhere and photograph sports and the culture around it, you can actually say a lot about the society you are observing.

Movement is never only movement. It always carries something around it — context, access, culture, class, environment. Photography can bring some of those invisible structures to the surface.”

Do you have any future projects around sport that you are trying to realise?

“At the moment, we’re working on what has started to feel like a long-term project. It was supposed to be only five or six shoot days, but it has expanded into something broader. We are trying to create a portrait of cycling. obviously not showing every aspect of it, but approaching it through a few different human perspectives. The idea is to have three different protagonists at different stages of life: a very young person, someone middle-aged, and someone who has maybe already stopped working but is still deeply involved in the sports and still really enjoying it. We want to explore their relationship with cycling and have them showcase the great benefits it brings. I think cycling is a very powerful habit. It is also a very peculiar way to instrumentalize your own body to move through the city, or even across long distances wasting no resources. There’s something uniquely powerful in that.

At the same time, I think every sport is interesting in some way. I don’t think there are sports that are not worth looking at. You can find something compelling in almost any discipline. It is always interesting to be around it, to experience it, and to see what kind of visual and human stories can emerge.”