Pineapple, Seventies Wallpaper, Someone Worth Photographing

Photographer Daniel Dittus had been stripping wallpaper from his new apartment—the seventies kind, presumably hideous—when he shot this portrait of Julia Eh for Sticks & Stones. Julia works at Vintage Gallery in Hamburg, selling secondhand clothes to people who already have good taste and making sure they leave with better. She’d never been in front of a camera before this.

I met Julia through a friend and was immediately taken by her style and her vibe, Daniel said. The sun was out, which helped. And Julia just did her own thing—she wasn’t performing for the lens, she was just being herself. The pineapple is unexplained, which is the right call. Some props earn their place by refusing to justify it.

There’s a particular kind of photograph that only works when the subject doesn’t need the photograph. Julia looks like that—like someone who agreed to this as a favor and then forgot to be self-conscious. Hamburg has a way of producing people like that. Unhurried, specific, entirely at ease in their own clothes. The Schanzenviertel runs on them.