Here are two more pictures from my trip into the past times of analog photography, shot on February 13. Bharat Choudhary, a close friend and colleague of mine, is doing his professional project with families all over the state and even in neighboring states and he will need a car to get around – which means that he’ll have to get a Missouri driver’s license. So he asked me if he could take a few practice hours in my car, and a couple of weeks ago we went out and drove around Columbia and down Highway 63 for a while.
The day after, we both found out how lucky we were to still be alive when the right front wheel suspension of my car broke out of the blue in the parking lot opposite the Reynold’s Journalism Institute. If that had happened at 70 mph on the highway, we would have both been nothing but a bloody stain on the road…
Carefully making his way down Broadway…
The unfamiliar view from the passenger seat of my car.
April 7, 2010
About time for some updates here… Over the last weeks, I have been shooting a lot of analog black-and-white, mainly because I just felt like doing it and because I was fed up with digital photography. After posting a few initial images several weeks back, I was waiting for fresh developer for about three weeks before I could finally start developing and scanning all those rolls of film that had accumulated in my backpack in the meantime. Over the next few days, I’ll post a few selects of that time.
Today’s photos are from a hip-hop battle a couple of weeks back at the Blue Fugue. Since I didn’t really pursue a journalistic mission with this field trip into analog photography, I don’t have any captions to go with this particular set of images. But that wasn’t the point of it, either. Let me know what you think of them!
April 6, 2010
Being fed up and frustrated with the distanced and removed nature of my recent photography and inspired by a dear friend, I have decided to take a step back in time to when photography for me was not merely a tool to tell stories, but rather a little miracle, a slowly revolving series of secrets, without a delete button and a display for instant results. A time when a picture wasn’t born out of the feeling that what’s in front of me is an important part of the story that I am expected to capture, but simply out of a mere impulse, a feeling of space, time, light and moment all coming together that makes my finger push down the button.
Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t think that telling stories in pictures isn’t good. In fact, I believe that it’s one of the most wonderful forms of communication, otherwise I couldn’t be doing what I do. But I do believe that with going digital, I have lost part of my passion for this medium, and lately I was approaching photography very stiff and methodically. Going back to shooting analog black-and-white is my form of therapy to regain what I’ve lost somewhere along the way – and ideally what I find will carry over and enrich my “professional” photography.
These are just some random images from a day out at Devil’s Backbone with Sibylle and Marine last week and some shots of a hilarious night of Ping Pong and Karaoke last Thursday. It was the first roll of film that I shot in almost four years, and I loved it…
February 6, 2010