Slopes

We'll be hitting the slopes really soon. Tomorrow we're driving to Basel and the next day onwards to Klosters, where we will stay a week in a chalet with fellow photographer Hans Bol and his Swiss wife Joli. For me it is 30 years ago I stood on skis. Ann and Emma have never been to the snow. So this will be an adventure for us all. I hope to return in one piece.

I took the picture above about two weeks ago, on an early morning flight from Brussels to Rome. It was a crazy day in which we did Brussels - Rome - Venice - Milan - Brussels on one day and managed to squeeze in an 5 hour meeting in Venice also. Our plane hung above the Alps around 7:45am on that crisp winter morning. I had the Leica CM, loaded with Neopan 1600, with me and took a few pictures from the window. We cut into the alpine arc west of Munich, traversed Austrian Tirol and Italian Alto Adige and Trentino. I recognised the magnificent peaks of the Ortler range and the glacial slopes of the Adamello-Presanella group. It was above the splendid Lago di Garda that we took our leave of this marvellous landscape.

More news in a good week's time. I am taking the D80 and the Mamiya 6 with me ...

Maiden voyage

I almost forgot to take note of it in this blog but it's not without importance: Imagerie - the joint venture between Frans Roex, Pol Leemans, Johan Doumont and myself - has started its activities early December with an introductory course on digital photography. Soon there will be another session plus a more comprehensive 3-day Photoshop course. The sessions are not fully loaded, but we have to start somewhere.

I am bit worried about the profusion of tutorials and courses on Photoshop and digital photography these days. Johan thinks that in the long term this will actually help us. Soon people will not be able to see the wood for the trees anymore. Focused information will be all the more valuable. I hope he is right. But maybe we should have started this a year ago. Anyway, the boat is in the water and in a couple of months time we will know already a lot more about the viability of this idea.

Picture above is courtesy of Pol Leemans. It shows Johan Doumont explaining the basics of digital photography to his students. Frans Roex is listening in, slightly amused, on the left hand side.

Luc & Vera

Today we spent a delightful afternoon with Luc and Vera. Luc is a colleague of mine. Actually he is more of a mentor. He has always been very generous in sharing with me his vast experience in working with organisations. Generosity is also a defining characteristic of Vera. She is a very sensitive but also resolute human being.

First we made a walk, with Luc improvising a tortuous itinerary through a melancholy winter landscape. The rest of the afternoon and evening we spent talking over a delicious, earthy meal, prepared by Vera, with the crackling blaze of the fireplace (and occasional piano improvisations by the kids) in the background. I can't think of a better way to pass a chilly and dusky winter afternoon.

The picture shown above is a portrait of Luc, taken last summer. Luc and Vera have a marvelous chestnut tree in their garden. It's his favourite spot to do his thinking and writing. I also have a nice portrait of Vera, which I may want to show later.

Taken with the Horseman 6x12 back on the Canham DLC 45, Rodenstock Sironar-S 150mm, Rollei R3 @ 400 asa.

Family time

Yesterday we had the family over for Christmas. What better occasion to do some portrait shapshooting with all these lovely kids around? And I keep bugging the grown ups too. ;-)

From left to right: my niece Marit, my daughter Emma, my sister-in-law Christine, my son Witold, my sister-in-law Sabine and my niece Eline.

All pictures taken handheld with the D80 and the Sigma 30/1.4 at full opening, iso 800. Great lens: it just keeps sucking in the light, giving ample freedom of movement even on a dusky December afternoon ...

Merry Xmas

Dresden Hauptbahnhof
December 8th, 2006
Leica CM, Rollei Infrared @ 100 iso (reverse development)

Friedlander in Dresden

I like to think this one looks a bit like "Friedlander in Dresden" ;-)

Taken with the Leica IIIf and the 25mm Skopar. Wonderful little lens! But sadly taken out of production and almost sold out.

Here is Marko's version.

Another one from Dresden

And another one. This shows the virtues of the little Summarit in the Leica CM. Even at A2 format there is plenty of crisp detail. Even the facial expressions on the womens' faces are recognisable. My son Witold likes this picture, particularly the warm and soft quality of the light. Again taken on Rollei IR film at iso 100, reverse development.

Dresden II

Here is another picture from the Dresden trip. It's taken with the Leica CM on Rollei IR film. I have worked with our film only once before, on our excursion to the Hakendover procession. Exposed at 100 iso and developed in the Scala process it delivers marvelous b&w chromes. I was impressed with thr results first time round and I now have a stock of this film in various formats (24x36, 120 and 4x5"). It's a real pleasure to look at these luminous and contrasty positives. I can't wait to experiment with larger sizes.

Development is done at Photostudio 13 in Stuttgart. Scanning of these chromes is odd. I am now working with the Epson V700 with which I do not have a lot of experience yet. But I noticed exactly the same phenomenon with the 3200. Looking at the chromes with the naked eye it is obvious that they are pin sharp. Scanning them results in a fairly blurred image. I am not used to doing heavy sharpening (mostly none at all) but here I have to. The settings for the unsharp mask look just ridiculous: a maximum amount of 500% with a radius of 2 pixels and a treshhold of 1 level. Subjecting it to that unsharp mask just makes the picture pop into focus. It is nicely sharp. And there is a very noticeable but very nice grain. The resulting look fits, I find, this kind of street photography very well. Otherwise the scanning is a piece of cake. There is hardly any tweaking to do. Exposures are usually spot on first time round.

I printed a couple of images with the new Epson 3800 at an A2 format and they look wonderful. Sharp but not artificially so. Nice grain. And the contrast and luminosity that is so very characteristic for this emulsion. Lovely.

Dresden

Two weeks ago (already!) I had the pleasure to spend a day in Dresden with Marko Hehl, a German photographer whom I met over the Internet. Actually he was one of the people who found out about the Rangefinder book we published last year and ever since then we have been in contact. Marko has a blog which was originally focused on rangefinder photography too, but recently he has discovered the joy of medium format and as a result he has sold all his rangefinder gear.

It was the first time I visited this part of Germany. I took the train from Prague to Chemnitz, where Marko lives. It’s close to the Czech border and an hour from Leipzig and Dresden. Marko has vivid memories of the DDR era when his hometown was called Karl-Marx-Stadt. His stories about those days sound surreal to Western ears but I always remind myself that what happens in our part of the world is probably equally weird (and for that matter morally reprehensible) to outsiders.

We spent the day shooting in Dresden. I had only packed the little Leica IIIf with the Voigtländer 25mm Skopar, but in addition Marco lent me his Leica CM. The CM is a delightful film-based Leica compact camera with a fixed Summarit 40/2.8. Indeed, I was quickly sold on this handy and handsome camera and I ended up buying the thing from Marko (oh well!).

We were lucky with the weather: best part of the day the city was showered with the most enchanting winterly light imaginable: blindingly luminous and yet soft. The recently restored Frauenkirche glowed like a tiara. But my most lasting impression had nothing to do with the splendour of German baroque. Of course I knew that Dresden had been bombed in the war. In fact, I didn’t know much more about Dresden than that. The remarkable thing is that, in one way or another, the fabric of Dresdener city life is still imbued with this sense of pain and tragedy. The magnificently renovated facades cannot hide that something unspeakable has happened there on those fateful days in February 1945. During our walk, I looked at street vendors peddling panoramic postcards showing the apocalyptic destructions at the end of the war and was deeply touched. I leafed through books in the “Haus der Bücher” showing harrowing pictures of those days. I remembered the few things I read about the effects of Allied strategic bombing: Ernst Jünger’s Paris diaries and Gerd Ledig’s “Vergeltung”. I also remembered Liebeskind’s “Jüdisches Museum” in Berlin, which thematises the suffering of the Jewish people very movingly with a dark, empty tower and I thought they should build a similar memorial for the casualties of firebombing in Dresden too. In fact, the whole city feels like this tower. There is a giant hole that punctures the energy field of the city. One can sense the void. In any case, I have become much more interested in this episode now and I am planning to read Jörg Friedrich’s seminal study “Das Feuer” in the next couple of weeks.

So we wandered around in the windy and fairly cold old part of town, Marko with his Rolleiflex 3.5 and I with the two Leicas. By early afternoon a cloud cover drifted in and from 4pm onwards we started to move back into the direction of the station, traversing once more the sprawling Xmas market. We spent a good half hour in the “Hause der Bücher” and then made our way through the new, dusky commercial part of town to the Bahnhof. The sun dipped a last time under the cloud cover. Around 6pm we bid each other farewell. Marko jumped on the train to Chemnitz, whilst I made may way to Berlin where I changed to the night train to Brussels. A sleepless and uncomfortable journey brought me back home, just in time for breakfast with the family.

In terms of pictures: I brought home two rolls of Rollei IR 400 film, one exposed with the Leica IIIf and the other with the CM. The picture shown above – obviously cropped - is taken with the IIIf. It shows the square in front of the Frauenkirche.

I'll be posting some more pictures from Dresden soon.

The best of the rest ...

My series of four black & white portraits of Burundi women has been included in the Christmas issue of the UK magazine Black & White Photography under the heading "The Best of the Rest". Indeed, it looks like I narrowly missed the mark in the 2006 B&W Photographer of the Year competition. The winners were published in last month's issue and now there is a series of five entries that just didn't make it but have been considered worthwhile to publish. It's great to feature twice in a year in this serious magazine!

The pictures are very nicely printed albeit it seems they are a tad warmer than I print them myself. The accompanying text is a fairly accurate reflection of the telephone conversation I had with one of their editors. There's a tiny little mistake in the technical details: D76 is a Kodak product. Wet darkroom culture is definitely going out ... ;-)

Hitlist Photo Books 2006

It's exactly a year since I started this blog. Sixty posts: that makes just over 1 post per week. I don't think I will be able to squeeze out much more next year. But it's been great fun and I look forward to continuing. It definitely is an incentive to sharpen the thinking from time to time.

Today I would like to contribute my short list of favourite photo books for this year. My library is growing very fast. Most of the books I buy are new releases but I keep always an eye on the photography section in second hand bookshops too. Amazon and Photoeye are my key suppliers. In addition I have purchased a couple of collector's items via abebooks.co.uk, notably "Wales: Reconnaissance" and "Periplanoussis", both by Koudelka. (By the way, with the publication of Parr and Badger's "The Photo Book: A History" - volume II has just been released by Phaidon - as a shopping list for lazy collectors it has suddenly become much more difficult to find many of the classic photo books).

There are always a small number of volumes that stand out. This year I would single out just four:

Instant Light - Andrei Tarkovsky Polaroids (Thames & Hudson)
A wonderful little book with an enchanting series of colour polaroids taken in Russia and Italy (in exile) by the famous Russian film director ("Solaris", "Stalker"). Again proof that diminutive size is absolutely no barrier to refined aesthetic pleasures in photography (perhaps to the contrary!).


Paesaggi Verticali - Vittorio Sella 1879-1943 (GAM, Torino)
Beautifully printed catalogue accompanying an exhibition in the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Torino. It provides a comprehensive overview of Sella's career as a mountain photographer. I was able to secure this volume thanks to my Italian teacher, who lives in Torino and was so kind to buy it for me and send it over.

Ken and Melanie Light: Coal Hollow - Photographs and Oral Histories (University of California Press)
Classic, very accomplished black and white photography in the social documentary vein. Ken Light portrayed a US industrial region in decline whilst his wife took down testimonies and oral histories. Altogether it is a very bleak picture that emerges from these pages. Judging from the reviews at amazon.com not everybody seems to think this is an unbiased view. See also the interesting website of the authors.

Araki
I received this copy of a Japanese photo magazine as a gift from my German friend-photographer Marko Hehl. It looks like a special issue devoted to the (in)famous Japanese photographer Araki Nobuyoshi. I knew Araki only superficially as an "agent provocateur", but this collection of wonderfully sensitive b&w photographs of his wife, including her struggle with illness and death, opens a whole new perspective on this artist. Remarkable. Thank you, Marko!

Pixeldiary

My good friend Johan Doumont has recently started a blog. It’s at pixeldiary.blogspot.com. As its title suggests it’s a photographic diary. It is Johan’s ambition to every day post a picture made on the day itself. A gargantuan undertaking that requireq strict discipline and stamina.

The diary format has, in the past, been taken up by other photographers. Years ago, when it was first published by National Geographic, I was awed by Jim Brandenburg’s 90-day epic in the winterly forests of his native north Michigan (subsequently published as "Chased by the Light"). I know of Frank Horvat as another photographer who has engaged in this kind of enterprise. The blog-culture has of course given great impetus to diary-style photographic efforts. I think Marko Hehl’s Rangefinder Virus-blog comes very close, although he doesn’t post a picture every day.

The diary concept coheres very well with Johan’s photographic temperament. He has always been a proponent of weaving photography into the fabric of daily life. His Pixeldiary merely provides a continued alibi to have his camera with him at all times of the day.

Nevertheless, as he hasn’t set himself an end date, I’m curious to see how long Johan is going to keep it up. I also wonder how long I would be able to submit myself to the rigour of producing at least one reasonably good photo every day.

Although photography is probably as much an obsession for me as it is for Johan, my photographic imagination works differently. For me the vehicle of choice is a project, not a diary. A project grows around a fairly well delineated conceptual core, at the cross-section of three dimensions: a negative format, a geography and an extraneous element. For example, the European Capitals project was defined by the geography of the expanded EU, a panoramic format and a choice to focus on capital cities. I like to nurture several of these projects – at various stages of development – at any given point in time.

The project-discipline is, I feel, different from the diary-discipline. It’s about oscillating between discrete nodes, rather than to submerse oneself into a continuum. I agree that it is important to be doing photography every day, but unlike Harry Callahan I don’t think it is necessary to be taking pictures every day. I am, perhaps, more the Annie Leibowitz-type, of whom Susan Sontag (her life companion in the last years of Sontag’s life) thought she didn’t take enough pictures.

Project or diary: it doesn’t matter too much. The important thing is to have some kind of discipline to structure one’s photographic activities. There are too many photographers that are driven by external events rather than their own volition or imagination. The result is then an anecdotal, incoherent body of work.

Meanwhile it is great fun to take a peek every day at Johan's photodiary.

Veriwide

On of the latest additions to my camera assortment is the fabled Brooks-Plaubel Veriwide 100. I have had an eye on this contraption for a long time, but it’s very hard to find in a decent state. Reportedly only 2000 pieces were built in the late 1950s. I was lucky to find a very nice copy in Holland.

The Veriwide is a very desirable camera for two reasons: first because of its unusual 6x10 format (unique in film-based cameras but increasingly popular today due to digital compacts that sport the 16:9 image ratio), and secondly because of its huge negative size in an immensely portable package. Apart from the older 6x9 folders, there is nothing that comes close to offering a 60cm^2 negative in a pocketable camera.

The Veriwide is obviously a fixed lens camera. It comes with a Schneider 47mm f5.6 superwide-angle lens, offering a 100° angle of sight (hence the name “Veriwide 100”). The angle of view is similar to a 20mm in 24x36. It’s also a direct-view camera with a detachable viewfinder in the hotshoe. The original comes with a Leitz-built equivalent to their 21mm viewfinder but my copy has been furnished with a viewfinder from an unknown make (it’s quite clear though).

As a 40-year old camera, it comes with a few quirks. The shutter has to be manually cocked for every exposure. Apparently one has to be careful with the film transport mechanism so as to avoid uneven spacings between exposures. The Schneider lens is sharp but suffers from a certain degree of vignetting at all openings. The latter point is of no concern to me as I think it will work well in black & white. And, as is this is a direct view camera, one has to work hyperfocally, preferably at small openings. Luckily we have Ilford 3200 in 120 format …

On the exhibition trail

I am happy to return to my blog after a long time. November has been hectic, with travel, report writing, workshops and interviews following each other in rapid succession. I have been to Washington, London (a few times), Prague and Dresden. There has been precious little time for photography. At least in terms of taking actual pictures. Luckily, whilst being on the road I have been able to see couple of interesting photo exhibitions. Also whilst travelling I have time to develop ideas, read and make notes. So, over the last couple of weeks an idea for a new photo project emerged that has got me really excited. More on that later. For now just a couple of remarks on two exhibitions I have seen, one in DC and one in London.

In Washington I had a whole Sunday free. Unfortunately, it was raining cats and dogs, so not a very good day to do some shooting (I had brought the Mamiya 6 along). DC on a stormy Sunday afternoon is as desolate as a burial ground. So I spent the best part of the day in the National Gallery of Art, regurgitating, with throngs of Americans, the old masters. There was a fairly small but busy temporary exhibition showing New York street photography from the epic years 1938-1958, with pictures by Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Roy DeCavara, Robert Frank, Saul Leitner (the only in colour), Sid Grossman, Alexey Brodovitch and others. Much of what seemed very daring at the time – stealth portraits, deliberate blurring, extreme clair obscurs – has been immensely popularised with the advent of toycameras and digital snapshot technology. There was a lot to enjoy but the image that pleased me most was a bit of an exception in this show, in terms of aesthetic, its size (biggest) and date (most recent). It was the only image by Richard Avedon: a 1960 portrait of the ageing but towering poet Auden in a New York snow storm. A very classic photograph, no gimmicks: Auden simply standing upright, in the center, looking down at a camera pointed at him from a fairly low angle (stomach height), with the snow whirling all around. What shone through was the impressive aura of a real artist.

In London I visited the Victoria & Albert museum, which is one of the biggest museums worldwide on applied art. Photography is part of its collection. There is always a tiny and varying selection of V&A’s enormous archive on display. In addition, there are more substantial temporary exhibitions. At this very moment there is an interesting show on ”Twilight”photography. I got to know a series of photographers – Gregory Crewdson, Chrystel Lebas, Ori Gersht, Bill Henson – I had never heard off. There were two exceptions to the familiar dominance of large scale colour prints in contemporary art work: Robert Adams and Boris Mikhailov. The latter really took my by surprise with a series from his project “Die Dämmerung/At Dusk”. These are panoramic pictures taken during the 1990s in his native city Kharkov. Judging from format and the perspectival distortion, the camera employed was a Horizon 24x58. The photos are very sloppily printed at a fairly small size (+/- 30cm wide) on very low quality stock of paper and then toned in deep cyan blue. Again, the toning has been done without care, resulting in stains and marked tonal differences between individual images. Lots of pictures have been taken on the fly, shot from the hip when Mikhailov was on the move. They are populated with shadowy figures, puddles with debris, bewildered animals, inanimate cityscapes. Some of the pictures where really heartbreakingly beautiful. Vestiges of a civilisation on the brink of annihilation. Their cumulative effect is uncommonly powerful. I was (and still am) bowled over. Sadly, Mikhailov’s “Dämmerung” book, published in 1996 is out of print and is nowhere to be found.

The picture above was taken in November, in Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art, Mamiya 6 on Rollei R3 film.