"I have always been concerned with the detail, with the question of how to make a detail, a thing "strong"". Sonderborg was an observer, a flâneur who loved to wander through cities and streets in search of a visual stimulus that he captured with his eyes and his camera. Unlike many other artists, moreover, he did not materially possess the object of his interest, but only its two-dimensional reduction as a photograph. Photographed, he carries his finds from reality home. "They are new forms, unseen forms. Because these forms are so convincing and I haven't invented them myself, that's why I take them out, for example, via a photograph and then use them. Picasso, for example, took his "objets trouvés" home with him and integrated them into his pictures. It's often the random thing you come across that fascinates you so much because it surprises you" (Sonderborg, 1985).  These images are distilled motifs, which he thus isolated from their narrative context and which served him as a basic optical structure for inspiration: Telegraph poles around which a tangle of insulators, electrical wires, cable bridges, girders, coils ball up into a seemingly orderless structure that actually makes sense; building sites with cranes and steel components; windscreen wipers from inside cars against the overhead wires of rail vehicles. "The port of Hamburg in particular brought me to a kind of fainting point due to the overpoweringness. It then took me a long time to paint something that could then stand up to the port of Hamburg," Sonderborg says. And: "That has to do with the strong condensations of lines and forms, which are simply magical for me." The restriction to a few high-contrast colour tones in Sonderborg's pictures, usually black on white, is also explained by the photographic images: What all the photos have in common is the extreme black and white contrast due to underexposure and the black figure seen backlit against a bright sky in a white background.