Tschersich portrays cityscapes in which people, upkeep, habits and uses always remain hidden. The tenor remains the same regardless of whether the scene is set in Charleroi, Liverpool, New York or Tokyo. Tschersich’s pictures are universal and never seem foreign or forbidding, but ever familiar in their everyday banality, even to those who’ve never been there before.

Tschersich is always on the lookout for motifs, but sometimes they just come to him by serendipity. As he roams the city, sometimes it’s simply there all of a sudden: that feeling he seeks to convey in his photographs. It is the perception of that touch-and-go moment when everything hangs in the balance, the instant before a fateful decision is to be reached: dereliction or gentrification, danger or safety. Anything can happen to Tschersich’s locations.

In order to keep as close as possible to the human gaze, the experience of an instant, he makes use of a method of digital montage invisible to the viewer. He puts several medium-sized negatives together to form one big picture in order to portray larger sections without distorting the perspective, which would be inevitable in a mechanically constructed single-shot exposure using a large format camera.