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"The reception history of the photo volume 'E.M.T in MSP' by Heinz Peter KNES is rather unusual. While still a student in the mid-1990s, the photographer began taking pictures of his younger siblings and their surroundings in their home town of Fellen in Lower Franconia. The pictures quickly found their way into various fashion magazines of the early 2000s (PURPLE, Spex, 032c and others). They seemed to contain something that editors were after: A combination of naive youth paired with a certain outsider-ness. Over the years, the project existed more as an idea or a rumour than as an actually realized body of work.
Named after three of Heinz Peter KNES' younger siblings, Eva, Mirjam and Thomas, and the license plate of the Main Spessart region, the complexity of E.M.T in MSP seemed to be a structural principle that kept the work from being appropriated too quickly and easily. What made the work so appealing to editors was the way it captured something about the present moment: an ineffable essence of identity; framed by an intimate relationship between photographer and subject. A window into a sensibility that is only just emerging.
While the narrative about the siblings' growing up and puberty is at the heart of the work, the village of Fellen in the Franconian hills serves as a backdrop that persistently shapes the lives of its protagonists. Beyond these two central themes and beyond conceptual cleanliness, the volume 'E.M.T in MSP' by Heinz Peter KNES also shows photographs of other young people, other places and various forms of subculture. They signal that the volume is also about departure and overcoming. First the siblings and the village, then youth itself in post-reunification Germany. The photographer places the project firmly in a broader historical and geographical context. The children are not limited to the context of the place or to being the object. They influence and are influenced - they are creatures and creators of society and history, of family and state." (© Edition Taube, 2021)