a self-taught photographer, Polke spent the next three years painting, experimenting with filmmaking and performance art. Photography In 1966–68, during his most conceptual period, Polke used a Rollei camera to capture ephemeral arrangements of objects in his home and studio. In 1968, the year after he left the art academy, Polke published these images as a portfolio of 14 photographs of small sculptures he had made from odds and ends—buttons, balloons, a glove. From 1968 to 1971, he completed several films and took thousands of photographs, most of which he could not afford to print. During the 1970s, Polke slowed his art production in favor of travel to Afghanistan, Brazil, France, Pakistan, and the U.S., where he shot photographs (using a handheld 35mm Leica camera) and film footage that he would incorporate in his subsequent works during the 1980s. In 1973 he visited the U.S. with artist James Lee Byars in search of the "other" America; the fruit of that journey was a series of manipulated images of homeless alcoholics living on New York's Bowery. He produced an additional series of photographic suites based on his journeys to Paris (1971), Afghanistan and Pakistan (1974) and São Paulo (1975), often treating the original image as raw material to be manipulated in the dark room, or in the artist's studio. Beginning with his 1971 Paris photographs printed using chemical staining to create works full of strange presences while under the influence of LSD, Polke exploited the photographic process as a means to alter "reality." He combined both negatives and positives with images that had both vertical and horizontal orientations. The resulting collage-like compositions take advantage of under- and overexposure and negative and positive printing to create enigmatic narratives. With the negative in his enlarger, the artist developed large sheets selectively, pouring on photographic solutions and repeatedly creasing and folding the wet paper. Completed in 1995 in collaboration with his later wife Augustina von Nagel, a suite of 35 prints entitled "Aachener Strasse" combine street photography with images from Polke's paintings, developed using techniques of multiple exposures and multiple negatives. Painting Polke's early work has often been characterised as European Pop art for its depiction of everyday subject matter—sausages, bread and potatoes—combined with images from the mass media. His "Rasterbilder" from that period are works that exploit the raster-dot technique of printing as a way as of subverting and bringing into question the