Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof: Lives in Public

In June 2026, I spent two days and two nights photographing the streets, parks, station halls and railway margins around Frankfurt Central Station. An open drug scene exists beside offices, hotels and nightlife. Travellers wheel heavy luggage towards their accommodation while, only metres away, people sleep on pavements, use drugs or ask strangers for money. For many people living with addiction or homelessness, the station district has become a place of refuge.

I wanted to move beyond what was immediately visible and listen to the stories that had brought people here. The photographs began with what could be seen, but the encounters were shaped by what people chose to tell me.

The signs of hardship were immediate: pipes, syringes, wounds and exhaustion. I witnessed violent confrontations, including one involving a knife, and people collapsing in what appeared to be overdoses. The summer heat was oppressive. People I met also spoke about surviving the bitter cold of winter, when the same streets offer little protection from the weather.

Alongside fear, anger and physical danger, I encountered tenderness, vulnerability and an extraordinary openness to share. These qualities did not make the circumstances less severe. They revealed how much of a person remains unseen when addiction or homelessness becomes the only fact by which others recognise them.

Many people described lives that had once seemed stable. They spoke about jobs, partners, families and homes. Then work disappeared, relationships broke down or the support around them fell away. Their histories did not follow one path, and addiction was rarely the beginning of the story. Some described drugs as a way of numbing pain. Dependence then narrowed their choices further and made leaving even harder.

One man showed me a photograph of himself on his phone. He told me it had been taken five years earlier. The face on the screen and the face before me belonged to the same person, yet the distance between them could not be measured in years alone. The image held evidence of another life, but also of the person who was still standing in front of me.

One man said that it did not make him sad when someone decided not to give him money. What hurt was when people refused even to look at him, when they treated him as though he were invisible.

“I am human too,” he said.

These photographs do not offer a solution, and they do not turn suffering into spectacle. They record a place where private pain has become part of the city’s public landscape, visible to thousands of people who pass through it every day.

The question is not only what we see when we look at these photographs. It is whether we are willing to recognise the person before the condition, and what we owe those whose most vulnerable moments unfold in full view.

Consent note: Every person pictured gave informed consent to being photographed and to the publication of these images. Consent was obtained when they were not intoxicated.

Content note: addiction, visible drug use and violence.