Olivier Ficco – strassenfotos.jimdo.com
Last month the French photographer and novelist-to-be Olivier Ficco did an interview with me about street photography on his blog. I had to answer twenty questions and it was “hard work” for me. Never before I had thought about street photography so intensively but I found my point of view. It was a pleasure for me and if you are interested in the results, follow the link to the interview.
One, Two, Three | Karlovy Vary 2016
The good thing is, it needs not much to do street photography: Open eyes, a camera of any kind, a step out of your apartment and you have your subjects and objects to shoot. Obviously everyone can do this. The bad thing is, everyone does it. Have a look at the social media platforms. Zillions of people are shooting strangers in public areas, labeling their pictures with “street photography” and tagging them with fancy phrases, because it’s “en vogue”. But very often the photographs look like a pure scan of reality – randomly, boring and irrelevant, pimped by post processing. No composition, no idea, no story is behind them. The output seems to be nothing more than digital noise in a community of wannabe-photographers. Maybe that’s why the New York-based Canadian writer and photographer Micheal Ernest Sweet pointed out last year: Street Photography Has No Clothes (referring to the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”).
Rostock | 1988
When we enter this world, we are surrounded by pictures and photos everywhere. That’s why I can’t remember the very first photograph I’ve seen or was interested in but I guess the old family albums where the first source of interest. I know, that I was fascinated by the “journey to the past” and the stories behind the photographs.
As a teenager I discovered the slides archive of my grandfather, who I’ve never met because he was already gone before my birth. It was a magical moment when I realized, that I could see a moment in time, a frame of the past exactly in the same way my grandpa had seen, when he pushed the release button.