BRAVO 20

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Polaroitential


Another very busy week. I spent 4 days in London, facilitating three workshops. Pretty exhausting. Next week I will be in Geneva and London. And then it gets a bit quieter.

A few more polaroid pics from my Berlin visit. I quite like them. Incidentally, the picture on the left was taken through the windshield of a car (covering the flash with my hand). That's why it extra blurry and extra washed out.

There's potential in this quirky camera!

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Pola 600


Last weekend, when I made my way from Chemnitz to Berlin I made a stop in Leipzig. With an hour to kill between two trains, I descended into the huge, cavernous shopping mall buried under Leipzig Hauptbahnhof. I popped into the Saturn to buy some extra film when my eye caught this offer for a simple Polaroid camera and assorted film. I bought one for 35 euro and added six packets of 600 film. It works like a breeze. Much easier to handle than the older Polaroid 340 I have. With auto exposure and autofocus, it's basically push button. The lens is a plastic 2-element thingie. It's great to see the undeveloped picture pop out of the camera and then see the image emerge over a span of merely two minutes. And then there are those wacky, washed-out, adorable polaroid colours.

I had a great time in Berlin shooting a stack of polas. This is one of the first images, taken near Alexanderplatz. I'll post a few more later on.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

The boy and the bull


In passing: a picture made during a walk with friends, a week ago. XPan (cropped) with 45/4, Neopan 400.

Meanwhile I have spent quite a bit of time finishing my European Capitals book in collaboration with Eddie Ephraums from Envision Books. Files are at the printers. It's almost there ...

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

12:08 in Chemnitz


I took this picture whilst visiting the Tietz in Chemnitz. In a way it looks very German to me (but make no mistake: I like the Germans).

Maybe it is not obvious from this picture but the Zeiss ZM 28/2.8 Biogon is a gem of a lens: sharp as a razor, beautiful microcontrast. And compared to Leitz, it's even affordable.

I'll be off for two weeks of travelling. As a result, there won't be a lot of movement on the blog. Pity as I have quite a few things to show ...

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Marko


I went to Chemnitz this weekend to attend the opening of our "Street-People-Nature" exhibition at the Tietz, featuring pictures by Marko, Nobuhiro Nagashima and myself. Marko has put a lot of work in setting the whole thing up. The presentation of the pictures was very clean and tasteful. I was very happy with it. Marko counted 35 people at the opening. He was disappointed by the low turnout but I know from previous experience that it is not easy to get people afoot for a photo exhibition.

For me it was a good opportunity to meet Marko's partner Annette and their very charming little daughter Akemi. I was also very pleased to get to know Marko's mother in law and his boss, Herbert. All very good people.

It was also a real pleasure to finally see the pictures of our brother in arms, Nobi. His approach is very discrete and understated, with a tinge of melancholy. I would say: very Japanese, but that may be stereotyping his way of working. However, definitely Japanese is his attention for detail in presentation. Framing, matting and signing of his pictures was obviously done with great care. It really shows.

Above two portraits from Marko, taken with the Hexar RF with a Zeiss Biogon 28/2.8 and then cropped. Film is Neopan 1600. I hope he likes the pictures.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

1.2


I'm running. For now a quick photo of my son Witold, taken 2 weeks ago.
Rollei IR @ 100 asa, Scala development, Olympus OM-10, 55/1.2 @ 1.2

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Irish selection


This is the selection of 6 pictures for the exhibition at the Irish College here in Leuven. The project is ongoing ...

Bored ... ? ;-)


Johan looks pretty bored here, right after our visit to "Ingenium" at the Bozar in Brussels ... ;-) Maybe he was just beings wistful about the end of the holiday period. Next day he had to start teaching again.

Taken with my old Olympus OM-10 and a 28mm Zuiko. It's not my original OM, however. I left my camera to an African press photographer a few years ago when traveling in Burundi. I bought exactly the same (but with the manual adaptor) upon my return. They sell them for less than 50 euro these days. I haven't used the 28mm a lot but I'm astonished to see that it performs really well. It's one of the cheapest lenses in the range though.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

ChairLionCowHat

A few images of the last week. First from left was taken in The Hague (August 28, with the Leica CM), second was in Scheveningen (same day, notice the sea lion), third was taken at a farm (September 2, Hexar RF), and the last one in the row is from Brussels (September 1, with Johan, also Hexar RF). I've used Neopan 1600 throughout. I'm shooting an awful lot of rubbish these days. The harvest is really very meagre. But I'm shooting anyhow.

Connemara > Burren


There's another group show coming up, starting early October. I'm showing a small series of my Irish panorama pictures with a group of friends from Park Heverlea. Pol Leemans has been the driver behind the project. Location is the very beautiful and fully renovated Irish College here in Leuven which is turning 400 years old this year. Thanks for the opportunity, Pol.

By night


The Hague, administrative capital of The Netherlands, by night. August 27th. Leica CM, Neopan 1600.

Triumvirate

Marko is doing a great job in preparing for the exhibition at the Tietz in Chemnitz. These are bios of us three. Nobuhiro's self description lifts a bit of the enigma. I don't know him at all, but I recognise what he is writing about. Indeed, it's not us practicing photography, but photography doing something to our lives. That's why I hesitate to call myself a photographer (let alone "an artist").

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Manufactured Landscapes

Talking about Burtynsky: a few weeks ago I saw the “Manufactured Landscapes” documentary on his great photographic journey documenting the impact of globalisation on our planet. One wonders how a good film can be made about someone who just happens to produce still images at all corners of the earth.

Well, it’s certainly not a bad movie. The opening shot is even memorable: a camera dollies through the endless corridor of a Chinese factory hall impartially registering row upon row upon row of workers assembling something that turns out to be nothing less than an iron. The rest of the movie meanders associatively through the chapters of Burtynsky’s magnum opus: quarries, ship building and ship breaking, oil fields, refineries, and of course a good deal on China: factories, recycling dumps, the Three Gorges Dam, the explosive urbanisation of Shangai (and other megalopoles). We see the photographer at work, mapping scenes, wielding his Linhof Technika (which looks really diminutive against the vast contraptions he chooses to document), directing groups of people, studying polaroids, waiting for the light. It’s good to know some his pictures are set in scene. But most of the film is devoted to re-filming many of the sites he visited with a narrative overlaid on top.

Conceptually, the photographer has not a lot to tell. Of course, he shows only that side of globalisation that is tied up with the movements of commodities (ore, oil, bulk materials, finished products, rubbish). The other side – linked to the staggering financial flows permeating the planetary noosphere – is invisible to the photographic eye. What Burtynsky’s photos show above all is that man is an “additive” animal. If we need more ore, we dig deeper pits; if we need more transport capacity, we build bigger ships; if we need more energy, we build bigger dams; if we need more stuff, we build bigger factories; if we want to accomodate more people, we build bigger cities. Nowhere is a feeling for complexity in sight, for leverage points that allow us to accomplish more with less input, for the power of contemplating knotted - and not just the predictability of flat - topological space.

A question I ask myself: why is Burtynsky’s work beautiful? What’s the purpose of the beauty? Burtynsky says he doesn’t want to take position, but obviously he does. He couldn’t do otherwise. Does beauty invariably amount to an endorsement and ugliness to a condemnation? I don’t know. The photographer does not address the question.

Ingenium



Yesterday (my birthday) I visited the “Ingenium” photo exhibition at the Bozar in Brussels (www.bozar.be), together with Johan Doumont. It’s a very big show featuring almost 350 pictures. It starts with a series of images dedicated to the four basic elements – air, water, earth and fire – and then offers a survey of all kinds of ways mankind has tried to control and domesticate these forces. Predictably, the vastness of this subject matter and the wide range of photography styles represented (National Geographic-like stuff, socialist realism, pictorialism, humanist photography, Düsseldorf school, modern photo journalism, etc) make for a quite disjointed viewing experience. Of course it’s always good to have the opportunity to see a real Becher, Burtynsky, Sugimoto, Misrach, Frank, etc. Lot’s of unknown names too. The most impressive exhibit was a tryptich by a photographer unknown to me: Paolo Nozzolo (?). It showed three sober, sombre black-and-white pictures taken at different locations remembering the Shoa.

Picture above: Thomas Weinberger, "Cracker", 2003

The Hunt


A week without postings. However, I’ve written two new Amazon reviews this week. (And shortly I will start another (professionally-oriented) blog which will take another slice from my time budget.)

The good news is that I have been shooting this week. I have the Leica CM almost always in my pocket, but I have also dusted off the old Olympus OM-10. Last week I also received the black Konica Hexar RF which I purchased on eBay: fantastic camera that comes with an M-bayonet, a super clear viewfinder, aperture priority exposure and a very silent motor winder. The quality of workmanship is outstanding. A real pleasure to work with.

As I’m shooting I’m trying to worry less about results. So I’m shooting more. I’m shooting all kinds of things. Things I wouldn’t have bothered with a few weeks ago. Not that it’s all great stuff. Just searching.

As I still have to get my rolls from the lab, here is an older picture I found in a corner of my hard disk.