In photographing Germany, I wanted to take two approaches. The first was to see the place in passing glances, always on the move, collecting as much as I could of the surface of things. I spent several days working like this in Frankfurt and Stuttgart.

I also wanted to explore some issues of personal significance. For more than seven years I've photographed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their consequences. I'm spending more time looking at the diaspora from the wars, and had heard that there were many Afghans and Iraqis living in limbo in Bavarian refugee camps. I spent several days in Wurzberg with a group of Afghans, most of whom had spent years there without a decision on whether they would be granted permits to stay. In most cases, they had detailed evidence for the threats they faced and their reasons for fleeing. The mood was grim. One man had recently committed suicide. Another had begun cutting long gashes in his arms.

I then went to Stuttgart. My dad's brother, a Dutchman by birth, lives there with his wife, three children, and seven grandchildren. The family is Dutch, German and American. I see them very rarely and I thought it would be nice to see how my own blood was a part of Germany.

Finally, I spent a day in the concentration camp at Dachau. I am Jewish by birth and from an early age I was exposed to images and stories from the Holocaust. I'd never visited a camp before, and given how much of my work focuses on the seductions of power and its excesses, I thought it a responsibility to visit.

These short pieces aren't meant to be definitive. They are merely an outsiders fleeting impressions of the things that stopped his eye.

-Peter van Agtmael