On Strike

Paris. While métro and RER ground to a halt last week I found out how small that city really is. Everything seems to be in walking distance once you are forced to walk in the streets and stay away from those endless tunnels connecting the various métro stations.

Hamburg. Strikes seem to follow me. Today and tomorrow the railway strike will also affect Hamburg's S-Bahn. I fear that this will have the converse effect of the strike in Paris - the town of my temporary residence will seem even bigger than it actually is. Though I wished there was more Paris and less Hamburg on this planet...

Gdansk. Yet other strikes precede me. While in that Polish city some months ago I spent a fair amount of time and film on the shipyard which was the stage for one of the most momentous walkouts in recent history. A pity GEO Saison did not choose any of those shipyard pictures for the Gdansk feature in their new edition which hit my letter box yesterday. I will easily forgive them though cause I very much like how they treated the rest of my pictures (click on image below).

Watery

The profane act of using my Nikon as a stopwatch for a long time exposure of my Hasselblad aroused my well hidden romantic core. It happened in St. Petersburg last week. Me standing on a bridge, Nikon dangling from my neck, opening its shutter for four seconds just to tell me and Hasselblad how long four seconds are. While I usually delete pictures resulting from that process right away, I somewhat liked that unintentional image of a canal for its fluffiness and airiness. Which made me want to reproduce that effect again and again every time I met a waterway. The resulting series (which can be seen when clicking on the image above) is neither representative for my work nor for the impression St. Petersburg made on me (loud&dusty). Still it gives a hint at how the city could feel like if for example cars were not accelerating every time you set your foot on a zebra crossing. Et cetera.

Less watery images to come.

Fed up

I am fed up with violence, platitudinous phrases, naiveté, complicity - and all those photographers (including me) who are looking for stereotypes. Ergo Saturday was my last trip to G8-Land. The slideshow which I compiled (it can be seen when clicking on the picture above) is still too affirmative for my taste. Might change that later.

Peace!!

Dear festeros alcoyanos,

by clicking on the picture below you can see impressions of last year's fiesta (just published in Merian magazine of May ´07). Hope you have already recovered from this year's battles and are eagerly preparing for next year's row...
Thanks again
Dagmar

Sound and Vision

Was a long night again. Click above to see what I was working on.

Out now!

Yeah! Buy it here
Sorry, texts are in German only. (Thinking of that student from Romania who wanted me to send him Martin Heidegger's "Sein und Zeit" because he intended to learn German through reading this book. Buy my book instead! Much easier read and way more pics than in "Sein and Zeit"...)

Style Imperialism

I won't tell any names. There are too many. I'm talking about photojournalists with a strong style which they impose on each situation and location they are confronted with. The ones who make one catastrophe look like the other, others who make Mexico City look like Mumbai. Ok, that sounds too pejorative - since I am not even sure whether a distinct style is a good or a bad thing to have.

Still sometimes I think "photographer x in city y" is a less interesting subject for a series of images than "city y in photographer x", that is to say what a city (or situation) did to the photographer's mind and eye. The last nine days I tried to find out what the city of Istanbul does to me and my shooting. Since this was partly supposed to be a holiday I also tried to develop a new shooting mode - relaxed shooting. Before I only came in two flavors: intense shooting until someone or something stops me - or not touching a camera at all. Unfortunately this did not change much. And Istanbul did not really jump at the chance to have a true impact on me cause it instead chose to give me a terrible cold which somehow fogged my senses. Nevertheless I came back with some gigabytes of images which I want to assemble to a multimedia presentation. Well, if I manage to mix the sound which I amateurishly recorded... Maybe that was Istanbul's impact on me - that I developed an interest in sound and vision.

Two pics now, the rest in a couple of days.

Making of

Two days ago my first book came into physical existence. It was printed in Salzburg which is where my publisher sits (Edition Fotohof im Otto Müller Verlag). Being a control freak I wanted to overlook the whole process. But there was not a lot to do. Just suggesting to put more magenta in some of the faces. That was it. The operators and their new machine did a great job. Might just cut back on that control freakishness of mine somewhere along the way...

The book is about four divided towns on Eastern European borders. It´s title is "Die da drüben" (something like "Them over there"). It is a photo book with a rather huge amount of text which unfortunately comes in German only. Dreaming of having an edition in English one day soon.

Read more about my first book in later posts (keep calling it "first book" for it sounds promising...)