Blog | Jakob Berr Photography

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.

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!

Last Sunday, Volker, Martial, Miten, John, Chelsea, Beth and I went to Finger Lakes State Park to enjoy the spring weather and get some fresh air. I finally got to play around with my 90mm after I had it in service for some focussing issues. It was a pretty amazing day, even though it was a little bit cooler than we expected. But we managed to keep ourselves warm with Beth’s washers set.

For all those who (like me) don’t know what washers is: It’s a game where you have to toss washers into a box from a certain distance. There’s a tube in the box, and if you manage to land your washer in the tube, your team gets three points. If it lands in the box, it’s worth one point. It’s not easy, as the washers tend to bounce out of the box even if you land them perfectly. But it’s fun as hell.

Once it got too cold to stay out, we all headed over to Beth’s and started a spontaneous barbecue. Her neighbors joined in, too, and it turned out to be a pretty fun night…

The crowd arrives at the picnic spot at Finger Lakes State Park.

John tries to calm down Presley, one of Chelsea’s two cats, who were with us on the trip and quite excited.

A truly international crowd: Volker from Germany, Martial from Cameroon and Miten from England (left to right).

They have a fire pitch at Beth’s place, so we combed their back yard for some fallen branches and found some nice, big pieces of wood. Kept us warm for the night…

Tatsuro (center), an exchange student from Japan, came over along with a few other people and added another continent to our international mix.

Jarrad Henderson, one of my classmates and a great friend, has been working for quite a while on his long term project Beyond This Place, a documentary on Black Greek Letter Organizations. In Jarrad’s own words, “Beyond This Place is a project that seeks to validate the important past and contemporary history of Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs) in a never before seen collection of images.” On Sunday, Jarrad opened an exhibition with prints of some of his images at the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center here on campus.

Jarrad, a natural born speaker, during his opening speech. I wish I could speak half as eloquently and confident as him…

In the hallway where the pictures were exhibited.

David Kennedy watches the opening ceremony.

After the ceremony, Jarrad – with his typical heartwarming friendliness – walked up to every single guest and thanked them for coming. You just have to love this guy…