Another fun collection: cracktwo.com

My favourite collection on www.cracktwo.com is “rare photos of famous people“. Good blog for a lazy sunday night.

awkwardfamilyphotos.com

Through a friend I found this blog and it made laugh a lot… I like to see “serious”, “arty” photography and write about it, but sometimes it’s just great to watch these nonsense amateur photos. Awesome collection & blog.

ROMKA Magazine No. 4 by Joscha Bruckert out now!

Fellow student Joscha Bruckert has published the 4th issue of Romka magazine. He’s also asking for a small donation as his online photography magazine has been downloaded sooo often that it exceeded his server limits by far (I know the numbers….).

I like the magazine because a larger part of photography I’m interested in is not “amateur” photography and further more is not emotional, “subjective” photography. But with Joscha’s project Romka magazine, I like very much that it is very personal and also coming with some text about the personal relation to the picture and the story behind it.

I like these very much (the following two screenshots come one after another in the pdf ):

Also this one is nice

But Joscha, come on, don’t make fun of the boy next to you,ok?

Back with Stefania Gurdowa’s glass negatives

Back in Germany! After seeing great photography in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York my notebook is full of photographer names and my ixus full with exhibition shots. I will try to get some of what I saw and liked onto the blog, but it was sooo much.

Anyways, I’ll start today with something I just found online, not during the trip.

It’s a project I found on lensculture.com, edited by Agniesza Sabor and Andrzej Kramarz. They found about 1000 glass negatives of a photographer called Stefanie Gurdowa (1888-1968) who ran a photographic studio in the 1920s and 30s.

Especially as this technique of preparing and exposing glass negatives doesn’t exist anymore (or is somebody still doing it?), these pictures look very much like a view into the history of photo techique as well as a view into another time, when people were not used to sit in front of a camera.

The accompanying book can be found here at photoeye .

 

 

 

Feldstaerke in Los Angeles with Thom Andersen

Greetings from Los Angeles!

As some of you know I’ll spend some time in the states and i’m right now for one week participating in a great international workshop (FELDSTAERKE) with students from Germany, Paris and from CalArts University Los Angeles.

As an introduction to the extremely big Los Angeles area, we saw an essay film by Thom Andersen that is called “Los Angeles plays itself“. Andersen takes literally almost all the movies that were shot in LA and uses their scenes to show the city. The film took about 3 hrs, but these youtube clips give you a nice idea of it. Cool piece, but in my opinion just too long. Maybe one has to see it in 2 or 3 parts.

“Komm, mein Maedchen, in die Berge” by Andrea Stultiens

“Komm, mein Maedchen, in die Berge” is german for “Come, my girl, to the mountains” and is the title of a wonderful book by dutch artist Andrea Stultiens. Unfortunately, I’ve not yet seen the book itself, but saw some stuff /articles about it online and if it’s not produced too bad I’ll totaly buy it (it’s only 18 Euros).

Through a colleague, Andrea Stultiens received several boxes with 3000 slides and after overseeing them all, she picked 45 pictures that show a couple over more than 3 decades spending their holidays in the mountains.

Again I think it’s quite  amazing what you can do with found footage and – if you edit your footage an interesting way- what kind of stories one can tell with these pictures. With “Komm, mein Maedchen, in die Berge”, Stultiens constructed a life, a whole world of that unknown couple and to me it’s also very emotional because in many pictures the connection between the two is so present that we, the observer of their live, turn also in witnesses of a big love.

Or maybe that wasn’t a big, lucky love at all? How can we know?

German daily FAZ has a nice online feature with audio interview here. They also did some research of the true history / identityof the two protagonists of the book. See the only german article here.

Here some more pictures:

What makes these photographs also noteworthy is the fact, that the husband who put the camera on the tripod seemed to have a good eye for framing the picture and plcing the couple in the wonderful landscapes of the alps.

I myself am also working on a found footage project about my family, still scanning and looking through the whole material, not knowing how and when this might end, but here some raw scans…