Philipp, Eighteen, Saarbrücken

He says he wasn’t mainstream even in kindergarten—which in his case apparently meant showing the other kids something in the doll corner that was probably meant for after midnight. He’s eighteen now, shoots fashion photography in Saarbrücken, a city tucked between Frankfurt and Cologne, and his sense of being out of step with the prevailing current has only grown more specific with age. Men should be able to wear purple. Women should be allowed to drive Formula 1. Gender clichés bore him. He loves kissing on park benches specifically because it makes uptight men with moustaches uncomfortable, and his entire stated motivation is wanting to help those people relax.

He shoots Polaroids when he can—not for the aesthetic, but because Polaroids don’t go to a lab. His secrets stay with him. He loves the internet for its anonymity. He hates public transport workers who walk past disabled passengers without helping. He hates coconuts for not tasting like Bounty bars. He has a mole on the lower palm of his left hand and cannot resist donuts.

What comes through most clearly in his writing isn’t the list of preferences—though they’re vivid—but the particular loneliness of someone who travels and finds it only half-good alone. He wants someone familiar to share the impressions with, someone to slip back into a private world with at the end of the day. Life is too exciting to enjoy alone, he writes, the way teenagers write when they haven’t yet learned to be embarrassed by sincerity. You can’t hold onto all those impressions by yourself.

He also says he finds people beautiful specifically if they were bullied as children for looking different. That’s not nothing, at eighteen.