For over twenty years, the writer Peter Handke has lived in the unremarkable suburb of Chaville, in the no-man's-land on the outskirts of Paris. From the very beginning, the Parisian photographer Lillian Birnbaum, a friend, came to visit him there. Fascinated by the partly intentional, partly accidental, yet always obeying a mysterious law arrangements of the things in life, she began to photograph in the house and garden. Five jackets in different shades of blue draped over a chair. On the kitchen table, feathers in a vase, a bowl of beans, an Arabic newspaper. A blue and a green rubber ball in a rusty baby stroller, next to garden shoes filled with leaves. Soon, Lillian Birnbaum had the idea: a portrait of the poet as an absentee. At most, his hands preparing mushrooms, or his bare feet in the grass, otherwise just: the things as they are with this poet.