Alexander Schulze (b. 1975), whose nickname Äxl stems from a teenage obsession with the music of Guns 'n' Roses, is a self-taught photographer from Berlin, Germany.

After a career as a professional booker for Rock bands, the Covid pandemic forced Äxl, who grew up behind the wall in East Berlin, to shut down his own artist agency Magnificent Music and find a nine-to-five job as civil servant at a municipal school board.

Suddenly thrust into a new life with disposable leisure time, Äxl discovered photography as a vehicle to explore the world around him as well as to articulate and share his worldview.

As a notorious ponderer whose perception of his enviroment was shaped by his studies of history and geography, he also sees photography as a trip to himself: Why is he interested in people and the transient nature of human acticity, urban textures as well as banal and desolate scenes in mundane settings?

In his search the photographer finds meaningful trivialities at the edge of our perception, vignettes of romantic tristesse from the fabric of everyday life, which, pieced together into a mosaic, convey an intimate Realism.

Always carrying a camera with him, Äxl finds his motifs in Berlin and Brandenburg as well as on dedicated photo trips, e.g. a trip to the Ruhr region in 2024.

Äxl is currently working on advancing and diversifying his photographic seeing, pushed by a fascination for candid street scenes and the abstract, as well as further building his portfolio about Berlin and Brandenburg.