What is your current position and who is your employer?

I am a freelancer. I have been my own boss for nearly as long as I’ve been in the United States. I have tried to get a job, but I didn’t actually do what it takes to get one. I regret not trying harder, but I don’t regret the freedom I have enjoyed all this time. I wish I had been a better role model for my boys and a better provider for my wife of 40 years. But few dads and husbands have had the gift of time to be with family, as I have. Even if money has always been tight.

When did you become a PPAGLA member?

If memory serves me right, I joined in the late 80s when I was a student at Cal State Long Beach and when Rick Meyer’s big orange news media placard got even me past many police lines.

How long have you been a photojournalist and how did you get started?

Really what started me in this career was my dad and coming to this country as exchange student from Germany in 1979. I spent my senior year of high school in Plainwell, near Kalamazoo, Michigan. My father had given me his old Voigtländer and told me to send some pictures home so ”we know what it’s like where you are.” I had never taken pictures before. My dad and my engineer brother were in charge of family pictures. I started photographing stuff that interested me, mostly old barns and weathered wood and landscapes. My dad complained because he wanted to see my life in America, people, places and cars. My art teacher at Plainwell High, Mr. Lamson, noticed a few of my 4x6s in my bag and said I should take a photo class at Kalamazoo Art Center. I loved art, especially sculpting, but I could not draw. Photography seemed like a good compromise. There my beginning photo teacher was Gary Cialdella. He changed my life. To this day, I find myself trying capture an urban pigeon in flight the way he did. He opened my world to Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, Don McCullin and Bruce Davidson. I felt like I was getting introduced to a secret society of magicians of light and form.

When I returned to Germany to finish my high school degree, where they made me repeat 12th grade and I had to take a 13th grade, I met my new “sister,” Patricia, who my parents were hosting “temporarily” for a language class until she was placed with her permanent exchange student family somewhere else in Germany. Needless to say, we didn’t stay fraternal. After she left to go home to Los Angeles, I followed her for a visit. Like her mom and her siblings, Patricia had enrolled to study at Cal State Long Beach. I would go with her to hang out and on one of my excursions I walked into the journalism building and found out from a very enthusiastic Wayne Kelly that they were offering a photojournalism degree. In Germany there was no such thing. I would have to study either fine art photography at a university and enroll in journalism classes separately or enroll in a technical college or a photo internship. Neither option seemed ideal, California won. But first I would have to go back to Germany to do my mandatory civil service, which I was able to do instead of military service. I did not want to shoot at my East-German cousins. The Cold War was still raging and Ronald Reagan led the charge.

Patricia came to live with me and to study for a year at the University of Hamburg, while I led a construction detail in a half-way home for the mentally ill. On a whim, we married at the end of my service and we moved to California. My parents, especially my dad, weren’t very happy. He skipped our wedding.

I then got several jobs working at different photo labs in town, including Tom Consilvio’s Silverlab in Hollywood. He had been a good friend and personal printer for Garry Winogrand and when Winogrand died of cancer, leaving thousands of undeveloped rolls of Tri-X in his bedroom drawer, MOMA’s John Szarkowski tasked Silverlab with the job for a major retrospective planned for the following year. Being at work was like a treasure hunt.

Long story short: My professional career got started half-way through the photojournalism program at Cal State Long Beach when I was an intern at the Los Angeles Times, working at the Southeast Edition where I had the incredible good fortune to learn from the late Rick Corrales. I think of Rick all the time. After my internship, I continued freelancing for the LA Times, working in the South Bay, San Gabriel, the Valley and the OC editions and for Metro. I joined JB Pictures and spent many years doing magazine work. When Jocelyne Benzakin passed away, I joined Sygma which later became the Corbis photo agency. The New York Times became a regular client of mine, as well as many German magazines and publications.

Please share some career highlights: 

There have been a few memorable moments in my career. But I would like to write about one particular highlight; one special and personal story that continues to pull me in and frustrates me to do more. I owe a debt of gratitude to Iris Schneider and Randy Leffingwell who persuaded and encouraged me to publish this painful part of my family history in the LA Times Sunday Magazine nearly thirty years ago. The article, “What will I tell my Son?,” explored the question of how to instill in my children a sense of belonging and positive identity when my family includes relatives who were Nazis, including my father who served in the Waffen-SS, but shed his beliefs after the war, and a grandfather who never stopped believing in Nazism until his death in 1988. My entire family, mostly farmers, craftsmen, cattle traders and small business owners, had been ardent followers of Adolf Hitler. I talked about bringing my son, Tristan, home for the first time to meet his family. Of course, my country had changed completely after the war, but Nazis were again making headlines in the early 1990s when tension over immigration peaked after Germany’s reunification. My country’s reaction to the arrival of foreign asylum seekers was in part ugly and sometimes fatal. As a whole and in the majority, Germans abhorred, opposed and condemned this violence and great efforts were made to welcome those who had fled war and discrimination for a new and peaceful future in Germany.

When I pushed my son’s stroller through the streets of my childhood neighborhood, I would encounter Nazi graffiti, as well as Antifa slogans. During travels to Poland and the Czech Republic, where I wanted to pay my respects and visit war memorials and former concentration camps, I saw antisemitic slurs on random buildings. Locals blamed German skinheads, although I found it hard to believe they would drive this far and paint with brushes and buckets of paint, when in Germany they were using spray cans. I would stop the car to take pictures and initially my son would just amble into my frame. Long before I considered publishing them, my photographs were a personal meditation on generational guilt and the prayer of a young father, witnessing his son make his way through darkness, his innocence transforming historical burden and weight. “What will I tell my Son?” became less of a question and more of a mission, that I was not going to spare any detail and tell him and his brother all there is to tell, so that they can grow up to be men who are aware, but not encumbered. Awake and empathetic. Accepting of their history but not condemned by it.

I think I did that. At least, I tried. My family history dominates my life. I was born a mere 16 years after the war, which ended 80 years ago. When I was young, Nazism seemed to belong to a time that existed an eternity ago. It seemed like a different world, maybe even belonging to a different planet. German kids were brought up to think critically about WW II and its causes. They didn’t spare us many details in confronting us with the evils committed by our country. But we were not taught that the term “our country” meant that “we” personally or those in our closest surroundings might have done those things. We were not taught to look at our own families’ possible roles in supporting and benefiting from Nazism. The Nazis were the “others,” the fanatical true believers on the other side of town or across the street. At the time, I didn’t know what roles most members of my family played and I didn’t ask very many questions. There was a code of silence. It was accepted that everybody was caught in a tragic no-win situation. Hindsight told them Nazism was bad. So they paid at least lip service. But the standard saying was that once elected and in power, there was nothing to be done against the Nazis, because they were in power. I never heard them say that “Yes” I voted for them. We never heard them say, “Yes,” I believed in them. They never said they “were” them. I still have so many questions.

When my mom and dad came to America for their grandson’s baptism they brought gifts. They packed Schwarzbrot, my favorite Tilsiter cheese, sausages, mom’s cake and oak seedlings. Of course, customs officials confiscated it all. They went through my mother’s suitcase, they emptied my brother’s, but for some reason they left my dad’s suitcase alone. So when we got home, there was my favorite bread, my cheese, another sausage and five oak seedlings. We had a feast and I planted the little oaks. Of the five, one survived. It stands nearly forty feet tall in our backyard in Manhattan Beach today. The mother tree is in Germany. I gave it to my mother after my grandma died and before I left to go to America as an exchange student. Later I was horrified to learn that my family had planted an oak tree before. They dedicated it on April 20, 1933, in honor of Hitler’s first birthday as the new chancellor of Germany and a few months before my grandparents married. It stands today in front of my great-grandparents’ home, where my grandmother was born.

Like all of my colleagues, who have spent careers documenting communities from all over the world that call Southern California their home, I feel blessed. I have learned so much and I am grateful for every day that I get to “go to work” experiencing so much cultural diversity and equally many viewpoints. I try to make the best out of every assignment.

Today in my career, I want to devote as much time as I can on better understanding my own story. It would seem natural to start with one’s parents and grandparents. You can’t be a good photojournalist if you can’t be honest. My father didn’t deny his membership in what the Nuremberg Tribunals declared an organization of war criminals. He gave me the broad outlines of his service, where he was, broadly, what it was like as prisoner of war, broadly, and how lucky he was to survive, very broadly.

My mom’s dad on the other hand couldn’t stop talking about the war. He had my pre-teen self convinced that it was the Allies who wanted the war and had started it. When I repeated his delusions in my 7th grade history class, my classmates jeered me and my teacher called me into his office after school. As disturbing as that was, finding out what my grandfather might actually have done in those years keeps me up at night today. You have to understand the terrible contradiction. He was in many ways straight from a picture book . He was the kindest, most loving old man who loved his seven grandchildren. He was adored by all of us. Because of a “chronic stomach ailment,” the story went, he was suspended from the Wehrmacht and did not serve as a soldier. When my brothers and I cleaned out our childhood home after moving mom into dementia care, I found old pictures. One was of my grandparents in 1942 with a pencil drawn note on the back that said that he was in charge of securing Wehrmacht food staples from the area around Krakow. I have known that he worked as a manager of big farms in Poland. But I didn’t know where and I didn’t ask who worked for him. It had to have been forced labor, probably made up of prisoners of war, but likely also from concentration camps. These questions haunt me, despite his repeated assertions of fairmindedness and kindness in all he did.

My dad did not deny that unspeakable crimes were committed by the Nazis and that the Waffen-SS played key roles in their execution. But he insisted that he didn’t know about the Holocaust while serving in the war and that neither he personally or his fellow soldiers behaved badly. They did what soldiers do, he said. They tried to survive and make it through to another day. As a radio man and forward observer in an artillery unit, he mostly called in strikes on the enemy. He claimed never even having used his own weapon except to suppress enemy fire while they were on retreat. He didn’t make a big deal of his service or spend a lot of time being defensive. He did not feel he was a war criminal. He was just an 18-year-old . He believed that the war was wrong, even criminal, and the Nazi regime deserved to die. He accepted that he would have to live with that label. He never talked about it. Silence became his coping mechanism and it affects his entire family, including me, to this day.

I am a grandfather now. The question, “What will I tell my Son?” is no less urgent now, since I will also have to answer to my granddaughter, to break the silence. She is six and will start school in the Fall. They live in my hometown in Germany, where Tristan moved to go to grad school. The war, to her, will be in Ukraine and Israel. Her dad, my son, is learning to speak Hebrew so he can communicate better with his new Israeli girlfriend’s family in Jerusalem.

I am planning a project visiting places my father had been during the war. I will try to re-trace my father’s journey from Croatia to the Leningrad Front and from there on a steady retreat through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Pomerania and to the Reichstag in Berlin, where he was taken POW on May 2, 1945. He turned 20 years old a few days later, being shipped on a train to a rock quarry in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, where he stayed until 1948.

What advice do you have for students and those hoping to become photojournalists?

This is a fraught time to be photojournalists. The politics are toxic. More often than not, I find myself defending my right and duty and obligation to cover events without taking sides or obvious bias. I cannot fake sympathy for fascists or join the mind-numbing chants of ideologues policing my every move and camera angle. You have to get close and keep your distance. You have to feel, but don’t let down your guard and forget to think. I always assume the best and most positive motives when dealing with my subjects, especially with people I disagree. I think that is the meaning of empathy. We are tested by difficult situations. I want to always remember that everybody has bad days. That I don’t need to judge. I have bad days, too.

What is something you know now that you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?

Talk to your relatives. Know where you come from. Ask questions of your old people and record their answers. Your grandchildren will be forever grateful.

Also, it’s the economy, stupid. Know your worth. I never cared much about making money and I never learned to stand up for myself, economically. Find a good agent who will do it for you, whether it is your significant other or a professional rep. Or find a job. Invest $100 a month in a Roth IRA, regardless. You will get old. Develop deep knowledge in a subject that really interests you. Study it, get a degree in it, pursue your passions. Technology rules. Become versed across platforms. Keep up on advances in your field. Learn to fly a drone. Learn to use what you have. Take out your Hasselblad and run some film, when you have the time. Take the time. Read a good book. Read. Read. Read. Write. Write some more. Plant a tree. Or two.

What is your favorite part of being a PPAGLA member?

I am embarrassed to admit that I have not taken the time to participate in all the cool things PPAGLA offers. I tend to reclusivity. But I love all my friends and colleagues and I respect their generous spirits, especially Rick Meyer, who gave me cartons of clothes when my boys were little and my bank account non-existent. We inherited several outfits from his daughter, but unfortunately, we didn’t take the hint and stopped after having two boys.

http://www.axelkoesterphotography.com