Color is it | Overdose | Berlin 2015
Life is in color (mostly), seeing is in color, actual cameras and smartphones capture fantastic colors. Why the hack do a huge amount of street photographers turn their photographs from color to black and white?
Sometimes you have to make a decision: Shaken or stirred, your place or mine, analog or digital. Do you really have to or boils it down to the same thing?
Millions of photographs floating the internet every day. Due to smartphones and other digital devices is it so easy to take pictures and to share them with the world that apparently everybody does it. It seems to be very hard for an average photographer to generate attention to the crowd and even harder to stand out of the banality and mediocrity in social networks. Maybe that’s why a few guys withdraw into niches.
I love my family, my friends and my work, but sometimes I need a distance – literally, to keep the balance right. That’s why I went to Prague by bus last week, found an inexpensive hotel in the city center and had three days for shooting.
I haven’t been there for over 30 years and nearly all my recollections of the city where lost. The only thing I could remember was the medieval “Charles Bridge” (see picture above).
In preparation for the travel I downloaded an app called Fripito, witch is a digital travel/photo guide. I bought the “Enchanting Prague” by Michal Vitasek per in-app purchase. Now I had a guide for the best places with fantastic views of Prague in my pocket. Not only that, combined with the navigation inside the app I could reach all the places from every starting point I wanted.
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.