If Taliban terror and photogenic heroin addicts form the popular image of Pakistan today, my own memories were shaped by foot-massage, smoking hashish and the cheerful company of the Sufis.

My photographs from earlier travels through Pakistan and India reflected the photojournalistic conventions of the magazines. But a short documentary film about Pakistan’s islamic Sufis, their understanding of asceticism and its relation to other world religions, provoked a curiosity in me beyond the usual fascination with the exotic. I imagined a series of posed portraits in an uninhabited landscape. The flat, undramatic sunlight of high noon would add its effect to a seemingly anonymous portrait collection. I had to resolve several difficulties financing my project, and it took two years of preparation, before I was on my way to Lahore.

I photographed many Sufis encountered at the many Sufi shrines in towns and villages. Friendly and curious about my endeavor, Sufi elders allowed me to take part in their daily lives. Using gesture and pantomine, it was not difficult to surmount the language barrier. Some invited me to their homes, where food and hashish were shared openly with neighbors, musicians and religious pilgrims. On another occasion, the musicians invited me to a wedding party where they were to perform. After the brief ceremony, guests fired their Kalashnikov submachine guns into the air, to announce the newlyweds to the rest of the village.

While photographing the whirling dervishes and observing their attitudes towards their surroundings, I developed an awareness of the Sufis’ understanding of their faith. One middle-aged woman was particularly striking. I don’t know exactly why, but she seemed to my eyes the most earnest believer of them all.

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Irregular update. Black and white and in color by
Patrick Becker, Holger Biermann and Jan Michalko

>> Booklet :
TERRASSEN AM ZOO
by Holger Biermann

Life is One Live it Well takes us back to the dodgy area of St. Georg in Hamburg and to many of its barrooms: Mickey Mouse, Windstärke 11, Zum Frühaufsteher, Rund um die Uhr, Moin Moin, Treff Hamburg-München, also the Vanessa Bar, Dschungel Bar, Rubin Bar, Moulin Rouge, Zar und Zimmermann and the Astra Stübchen. Now that the party is over, these bars have turned into mausoleums of the good old times and fading testimonies of a quartier that is frenetically changing under the effect of gentrification and the ban on street prostitution.

Henrik Malmström was curious to know what was actually happening inside these places. So, he started frequenting them. For four years, he befriended regulars, bartenders and clients. He became one of them. Then a sort of photo metamorphosis happened through the life in the bars of St. Georg. Like a cockroach, his camera, started crawling on the floor recreating what it feels like after a night of solitary rounds.

Balloons, velvet cushions, faded wallpaper and champagne – decayed fragments of the old fancy times, all shot with flashlight, all in close-up. They could perfectly be the snaps of a drunkard.

Kominek Books

Book: Hardcover with embossing / Edition of 375 / 255 color images / 256 pages + 1 loose paper /
21 x 31 cm / Photographed: 2011-14 / Published by: Kominek Books (June 2015)

contact:  email      web

Street photography is very difficult. The number of really good images that you get is very small in comparison to the number of pictures taken. With that in mind, I think you’re better off letting your intuition completely run wild.

Walk the streets without destination, turning left or right on a street corner or staying in one place, as your gut instinct tells you. Listen to your feelings.
Bend low and shoot up to make one shot, or stand very tall and shoot down for another;
Look thru the viewfinder when you can, but still shoot when you can’t…..Blur motion at 1/60th of a second, or shoot at 1/500th…..Mix it up…..experiment. Look for subject matters that pose more questions than answers. Look for enigmas more than cliche’s.

Even when you find interesting subject matter it is still hard to make a good picture, because the formal arrangement is also a huge issue and people are moving and things are moving, so it’s a lot to orchestrate; that’s why i say that street photography is the perfect medium for obeying your intuition.

For me street shooting is very much like meditation, in the sense that you’re in the moment and responding to it.
I try to eliminate extraneous thoughts when i’m shooting. Staying mentally focused is always a wonderful psychological and diaristic exercise… at best you get a compelling image, and when you don’t,
at least you have had the experience being ‘in the moment’ all day long, and that’s a very good thing… and like any art form, it reveals your subconscious.

– Richard Sandler

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Over a period of three years, from 2012 to 2014, I accompanied street kids gathering in the middle of Berlin.

Taking part in the everyday life and group rituals I finally gained access to a micro society shaped by the desire to find the family most of these kids never had. The different forms of violence those kids have experienced in their childhood became an inherent component of their own personality. This violence does not necessarily turn against others, but mostly against themselves in form of massive drug abuse or self-destroying behavior like cutting themselves.

Trapped in the experience of being rejected these kids developed an identity strongly affected by refusal against parents, authorities, any own perspective and therefor themselves. This destructive attitude aims in each direction and is reflected in the works title ANTI.

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He goes to Siberia.
With a camera.
He has the disease of the distance.
When he returns his pictures leave me hot and cold.
He comes again and again.
Perhaps I understand why: He is lost.
Even then, and then, his pictures leave me cold and hot.
I do not want to go to Siberia, I want to go to his pictures.
My condition is on paper.
Why he goes there, I ask him.
What he was looking for. He looks at his speechless Siberia.
His photos raise the same question to him: why he wants to see what he does.
It is abandoned, it is difficult inhabited.
How impotent is the occupant of the desolation.
He sees the terrible, powerful poetry thereof.
He do not know if that is allowed.
He photographs his distance and his desire.
He is gracious.
Grace is in the details.
Details are merciless.
He is a detail.
His own loneliness disappears in the desert.
Maybe therefore he goes.
To disappear.
To come back and show us his disappearance.
Self Portrait as Siberia.
Siberia is impossible to photograph.
He knows that.
He himself was impossible to photograph.
Perhaps that is what moves him.
To search the impossible self portrait.
As a ghost area.
Phantom Zone full of shadows.
Afterimage of a presence.
Every movement seems to be a deliverance.
Each movement seems vain.
Cold and warm.
Maybe he sees in the grayness and ruthlessness, in that
infinite, inhuman, incomprehensible landscape a homeland.
Far behind everything and patiently among the people and things,

Rilke said, is a homeland.

His Siberia comes close.
A dream landscape into a vacuous reality.
He looks until it sings.
A beautiful elegy in his eyes.
Does it sing if he is not looking?
No, then it is not heard.
He would also like to photograph it when he is gone.
In the speechlessness.
Siberia is impossible to photograph.
He knows that and it moves him.
The landscape of hopelessness.
to bring it in sight.
The banishment of the immeasurable.
There is no end, no way out.
Immunity in three dimensions.
The snow fourth.
The elusive as decor.
There is no drama, it only lasts.
He thinks he’s in Siberia to photograph time.
The toneless drama of the time.
The dramaturgy of an absent and ever present landscape.
Then there are people in the scene.
They live there, they are at home.
He’s on his way in their homeland.
He looks at how they live in the inhospitality that surrounds him,
and when moisture penetrates into him.
Sometimes he goes in their homes, embarrass places in the hopeless.
There plays the drama.
The hopelessness has different contours, shadows and movement.
Then he stands outside again.
As always.
He is an outsider.
Where does someone still stand when outside the immense actual state?
Is he still someone?
It is a impossible point of view.
Yet he is moving again.
It is the only way.
It is impossible to make Siberia visible.
He knows that.
There is only one possibility: to photograph his own Siberia.
Therefore, probably, he moves again.
And he comes back to show us his movements in his Siberia.
Feints.
The magic of the motionless.
The mermaids song and the lie of the distance. In the snow, the desolation, the troublesome habitability, in the cold and warmth of himself as an unknowable homeland.

The text is written by the author / poet Bernard Dewulf, 2005.

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Shinji Abe pursues his subjects in Osaka and Tokyo. His photographs reveal the world of the listless, the displaced, the derelict, the ecstatic. Shooting in the dark, he captures their forms with a powerful flash. These night-time photographs suggest the exhilaration of the hunt, no subject escaping this shocking burst of light.

In daylight, Shinji more often fixes his camera on young girls and aging men dressed as young girls. Even as his approach remains, in the best sense, primitive, his juxtapositions form graphically complex puzzles. Through repeated patterns and parallel gestures, background and foreground converge and intermingle. Along with the centre of the frame, he exploits the force of its edges.

Shinji Abe is represented by third district gallery in Tokyo (www.3rddg.com)

contact: email  web

Czech-born Jiří Makovec arrived in New York City in 2002 and embraced his new environment with an intense curiosity, never leaving its confines until 2009. From the Island represents his body of work from a five year period (2004-2009).

Makovec is an outsider, but he is not the street photographer of old, looking in at his subjects. He is not entirely observing from a distance. Instead he is like someone who is contemplating joining, and is maybe just on the brink of stepping into, the group. But this new shared realm of subject and photographer is not always what it seems to be. In Makovec’s work one senses that he is uneasy with the ugliness and chaos before him, and yet he also sees an undercurrent of strange beauty, and is attracted by it. In his imagery he seems to be looking for the liminal spaces between many realities and for that which might elevate himself and those around him.

Investigating the mystery of the island and playing with its uncomfortable harmonies comes naturally to Makovec. What he sees on the street are many pieces of evidence that teach us something about the nature of the City and its inhabitants. Makovec’s imagery is often playful and surreal. He is a brilliant technician with the eye of a cinematographer, and his images often have the look and feel of being painstakingly lit and staged shots. But they are not staged. They are, in fact, authentic moments instinctively captured as he makes his daily explorations in the island.

Makovec applies a careful sensibility towards his subject. There is nothing exploitative in his work, nor does he have a calculated agenda. He wants the viewer to participate with him and make the connection: “See, this really isn’t so strange. We are all a little odd at times. Yes, those cars are on fire, and yes, for a moment there, I felt frightened too”. All seems a little chaotic on the island and there are a lot of people–even an elephant lying on the ground, seemingly trying to find some comfort and respite. But at the moment before we feel the possibility of despair, Makovec offers us the solution of imagination.

Matthew P. Carson
Librarian & Archivist
International Center of Photography

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– exhibition at gallery oslo8 in Basel
Opening: thursday june 6 2013, 6 pm
exhibition june 7 – august 24 2013

- Support Jiri Makovec
photobook FROM THE ISLAND

The Uyghurs in Urumqi and Kashgar proved to be as curious about me as I was of them. Frowns and smiles were often simultaneous. A number of Uyghurs wanted to know if I was an American, and were surprised and pleased to learn that I’m of German origin. I had to notice that their praises were limited to Germanys worst epoch.

In the overcrowded streets of the “Old Town”, a continuing crush of people sweeps over the dusty pavements with an urgency I hadn’t experienced in any other city in China.

Though the government does its best to re-model and conform these Uyghur neighborhoods to Chinese norms, only a few native Han Chinese dare enter them. At the gold lettered gate of the “Old Town”, guided Han Chinese tourist groups wander in the Bazaar’s refurbished halls and passages. There, traders sell skins of lynx and wolves, or of yellow-pelted dogs, which are cleverly painted with patterns of black vertical stripes: the rare “Chinese tiger”.

Though Uyghur security guards are prohibited from carrying arms, heavily armed Han Chinese police and military are on constant patrol, the drab institutional Chinese uniforms in stark contrast to Uyghur traditional dress. The everyday wear of Uyghur women, in particular, features spectacularly colorful decorative costumes and elaborate adornments. Some of the younger Uyghur men can be seen in the long-discontinued fashions of Western department stores.

The last photographs of this series are of Tajiks in their home-town of Tashkurgan, high in the Pamir mountains. Close to the miltarized border zone of Tajikistan and Pakistan, Tashkurgan is a drab little town inhabited by an ethnically distinct people, its streets filled with a small army of undernourished stray dogs.

I photographed in Xinjiang Province for a short time and without editorial direction or ethnographic method. These photographs are a record of scenes, faces and situations which I found interesting.

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I wasn’t able to do much street photography back in New Zealand as I was living next to a beach and there simply weren’t many streets or people!

…I like getting up really close so I use 15mm and 21mm mostly. I need to feel something when taking photos and I don’t get that if I’m standing several metres away with a longer lens. I’m not sure that I’m especially ‘discreet’ when I’m taking pics … after all I’m standing right next to my subjects. A head-to-toe photo taken with a 15mm means that I’m less than 1.5 metres away. I don’t use the viewfinder very much and often just guess the focus and exposure. The actual moment of taking the photo is quite important to me. People can move quite a lot in a second or two and there’s rarely enough time to compose and focus so I’ve taught myself to estimate all that on the run and can change shutter speed or aperture without looking down at the camera…

…We can’t really control how people interpret our photos, can we? They bring their own point of view and life experience into any interpretation, and that’s fine with me. We’re all so saturated with images that I don’t think mine make any meaningful difference anyway…

…I frequently have frustrating periods when I experience blocks, when I can’t seem to get the photos I want without repeating myself.

…I’ve been walking around West Kowloon for nearly four years now, and know quite a few people there. I like listening to their stories. For example, hostesses in karaoke bars, Mr. Number 2 who spent 18 years in jail, Connie who lives on the streets but speaks perfect English, a few drug users who come and go, a couple of social workers, and so on. I sometimes do some community work in Sham Shui Po so I also get to know people through that…

…I had my M8 stolen in a mugging a couple of years ago, a drug user once pulled a knife on me in an alleyway behind Chungking Mansions, and three pimps chased me down the road once, and another drug user punched me last year, but Hong Kong is generally very law abiding and people are very friendly too…

To read the whole interview, click here

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Excerpts from Field Notes

… It wasn’t long, however, before I became aware of something else going on at the overlook: waves of tourists were continually arriving at the overlook’s parking lot in cars, buses and motorhomes, thrusting their way through this gauntlet of photographers not only for a clear view of the famous vista but also for the obligatory snapshot of themselves proving they were there. After witnessing this recurring bit of theater over several days, I found myself becoming increasingly fascinated with these visitors, recognizing what a striking cross section of humanity they were. I began to see the visitors as having a specific humanity, their own classification, a genus––Sightseer Americanus, if you will.

When I approached people for a portrait, I tried to make my request clear and to the point, making it clear that I was not trying to sell them anything. I explained that my wife and I were traveling around the country visiting most of the major tourist destinations so that I could photograph the activity of sightseeing. I would quickly add that I hoped the project would have cultural value and might be seen in years to come as a kind of time capsule of what Americans looked like at the end of the Twentieth Century; at which, to my surprise, I would see people often begin to nod their heads as if they knew what I was talking about.

I would then offer them a free portrait of themselves in front of whatever they had come to see, using a Polaroid camera I also had strapped around my neck. Once I had their permission, I went to work quickly, having learned that sightseers are on a tight schedule, are tired and exhausted from miles and miles of travel, and so had little patience for lots of photos. In fact, I generally felt lucky if I was able to get off three exposures in one session. If people were in a chatty mood or seemed to be particularly at ease, my encounters might last longer, but in most cases I made my portraits within a matter of minutes. Although I instigated most of the portrait sessions, there were times when the portraits came about on their own, such as when visiting tourists might ask me to take a picture with their camera so that everyone in their family or group could be included. I would gladly accommodate, of course, and if I sensed a possible portrait for my series, I would then ask if I might be able to take a picture of them with my camera.

… my technical approach to the portraits was simple and straight forward. For one thing, I hand-held the camera, which allowed me more spontaneity. Also, I chose to use 400 ASA film, which gave me a fast shutter speed for maximum depth of field. As I had done with the black and white work the year before, I used an on-camera flash, setting it to give me just the right amount of “fill light” to light faces in mid-day sun, so that eyes didn’t become lost to shadows under hat brims.

The use of flash had another advantage: I could make it equalize foreground light with background light, which often gave a false-backdrop or diorama look to the photograph, an effect that I grew to like enormously. As for how I posed the people, I was greatly inspired by the simple snapshot, having always been fascinated by its directness and unpretentious simplicity.

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I started with my ongoing project “home story” in 2008, when my life, the way I knew it, suddenly changed and searching for a place I could identify with and where I felt at home became very important to me. During the last few years, I travelled more than ever before and I lived in different cities and places.

My search for relations and connections with my surroundings became a primary ingredient of my state of mind and of the pictures I took.
My feeling for each of the places was slowly composed of individual puzzle pieces that I captured in my pictures.

Above all, it is the people, the faces, that for me are closely linked to the connection I had with the individual places and to a feeling of belonging.

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“A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines”. – E.B. White, Here is New York

I am more interested in poetry than fact, in the ever-so-slight transformation of reality achieved through a lyrical gaze rather than a supposedly “objective” depiction; I aim to inspire and move, not just to inform.

Yet, by being “poetic” I don’t mean taking liberties with reality. My approach to photography is a very straight one, shunning any kind of manipulation or distortion through technical or other means. My photography is founded on respecting and accepting the external world as encountered. The conjunction of my photographic gaze with chance and happenstance is essential to my approach, as is an emphasis on the evanescence of the encountered poetic moments I photograph.

I am interested in fleeting gestures and glances, the momentary field of interaction between passing strangers, the ephemeral dance of light and shadow and street life. I try to visually organize the chaos of the streets just enough to contain it in the photograph, but hopefully not much more than that. I aim for understated pictures that can demonstrate how the ordinary and mundane can be transformed into something mysterious and enchanting when photographed; pictures that pose rather than answer questions, and that evoke the magic immanent in everyday reality.

More than anything, what moves me is capturing the infinitesimal outward signs of an inner emotional life, the interiority of people even in the midst of the most public spaces.

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Albania is terrific and fascinating.

Albania has a bewitching soul that cannot fail to haunt you; it exhales something mysterious, a sort of indescribable magic. The beating streams of a Mediterranean sunlight, the meeting with unlikely landscapes, the smoke from burning wild rubbish dumps rising up into the air, the whirls of dust in towns and the sandstorms along the coasts lend the land a specific atmosphere and a strong personality. A kind of chaos prevails in the country, from out of which seeps fantasism; Albanians are probably keener to follow traditional conventions than a modern legislation. Mutual aid, honour, respect and hospitality are finally the true driving forces of the nation, building up a strong common thread that connects people to each other and to their territory.

What mattered to me was my desire to capture my own intimate experiences of the country, my inner-feelings, steering clear of Roland Barthes’ qualified “studium”. More than any classical documentary issue it is Albania as a photographic theatre with its inhabitants performing in their daily scenery that my images intend to reveal.

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Group Project: ALBANIA

What happens in Albania? The former closed Communist country with its long undiscovered coastline and spectacular Alpine interior retains an air of mystery in the midst of familiar old Europe. Albania is the close neighbour of Italy and Greece but, despite the fall of the Iron Curtain 20 years ago, has kept its secrets from us for too long.

This exhibition combines the work of six photographers based in Berlin, who for three years have been regularly exploring Europe’s least-known nation. They have immersed themselves in its unique and complex society successively moulded by the long period of Ottoman rule, the autocratic grip of communism and today by the excitement of emerging as a new democracy into modern Europe.

The idea of the project was to create a picture diary of a nation familiar by name but whose lifestyle, whose people and whose dreams are only slowly revealing themselves. Each of the photographers has followed his own unique approach to tell an unfolding story of discovery through images and other media.

This long-term project could never produce a straightforward narrative or even a journalistic documentation of a place as intriguing as Albania. Instead we offer six essays that build into a mosaic to capture what we found in a land just a short way away, but far from familiar.

• Georg Knoll
• Sebastián Laraia
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein
• Gilles Roudière
• Jan Zappner

I travelled to Albania, even though I didnt have a connection to either the Eastern Block countries or to the Balkans.  It was just a white spot, and not only on my map but also in my imagination. Directly in front of my house door, in the middle of Europe.

It fascintated me to travel to places that didn’t actually interest me.

That was exactly how I felt.
Like a fish out of water.

It seemed to be a country ruled by a dictator and whose culture seems to have been completely erased. Unable to see something, it left me completely bored.
I saved myself by running from Coffee to köfte, from köfte to Raki and from Raki into my bed and then awoke to start again.
This land seemed to me to be so heavy and still.

I caught a frame, that  pushed me to discover something interesting in the hope that this overall feeling of „nothingness“ would not overtake me.  But in the end, nothing happened and I was worn down, but also sure that something would come again.

contact:   email   web

Group Project: ALBANIA

What happens in Albania? The former closed Communist country with its long undiscovered coastline and spectacular Alpine interior retains an air of mystery in the midst of familiar old Europe. Albania is the close neighbour of Italy and Greece but, despite the fall of the Iron Curtain 20 years ago, has kept its secrets from us for too long.

This exhibition combines the work of six photographers based in Berlin, who for three years have been regularly exploring Europe’s least-known nation. They have immersed themselves in its unique and complex society successively moulded by the long period of Ottoman rule, the autocratic grip of communism and today by the excitement of emerging as a new democracy into modern Europe.

The idea of the project was to create a picture diary of a nation familiar by name but whose lifestyle, whose people and whose dreams are only slowly revealing themselves. Each of the photographers has followed his own unique approach to tell an unfolding story of discovery through images and other media.

This long-term project could never produce a straightforward narrative or even a journalistic documentation of a place as intriguing as Albania. Instead we offer six essays that build into a mosaic to capture what we found in a land just a short way away, but far from familiar.

• Georg Knoll
• Sebastián Laraia
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein
• Gilles Roudière
• Jan Zappner

I’ve been walking many miles and years there.
You won’t see any signs of gentrification or other
politically relevant issues in these photographs.
It’s famous Midtown Manhattan.
The very busy business and tourist district.
It’s easy to photograph there.

contact:   email   web

I am interested in how movement through cityscapes influences people, how architecture and light make shifting patterns over the surface of the city, how there are atmospheric blackholes of new feelings. I am interested in the habits of a city. In these photographs, narrative exists no more than a moment. Context is the content: how Cairo’s daily life looks.

contact: email web

Group Project
SAFARI SIZE
Photographs from Cairo

Four photographic positions show a different and personal view on the Egyptian Metropol Cairo.
A subtle and personal presentation of reality connects the photographic document in all four works.

• Holger Biermann
• Georg Knoll
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein

Andreas Pein

Although a country’s history is certainly not comparable to another one’s, i couldn’t help but notice a few similarities. Infact, Albania evoke well‐known, almost forgotten feelings within me. Not only because i was born and raised in the former socialistic East‐Germany, also due to a sort of numb feeling, still noticeable as an impact of the harsh dictatorship in Albania. I guess it have been these feelings i was trying to make visible. But aside all subjects i was trying to photograph in Albania, to me, these pictures have unexpectedly become a visualization of memories and feelings of my own past.

contact:   email   web

Group Project: ALBANIA

What happens in Albania? The former closed Communist country with its long undiscovered coastline and spectacular Alpine interior retains an air of mystery in the midst of familiar old Europe. Albania is the close neighbour of Italy and Greece but, despite the fall of the Iron Curtain 20 years ago, has kept its secrets from us for too long.

This exhibition combines the work of six photographers based in Berlin, who for three years have been regularly exploring Europe’s least-known nation. They have immersed themselves in its unique and complex society successively moulded by the long period of Ottoman rule, the autocratic grip of communism and today by the excitement of emerging as a new democracy into modern Europe.

The idea of the project was to create a picture diary of a nation familiar by name but whose lifestyle, whose people and whose dreams are only slowly revealing themselves. Each of the photographers has followed his own unique approach to tell an unfolding story of discovery through images and other media.

This long-term project could never produce a straightforward narrative or even a journalistic documentation of a place as intriguing as Albania. Instead we offer six essays that build into a mosaic to capture what we found in a land just a short way away, but far from familiar.

• Georg Knoll
• Sebastián Laraia
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein
• Gilles Roudière
• Jan Zappner

These pictures are loose photographic collection of moments throughout the last three years. Its an Essay about a country with spectacular nature and people with a raw personality still recovering from the „Years of the gun“, when an exodus of millions hit society. I met children raised in Britain, Germany or France and now being expelled to a remote village in the mountains. The  desparate view of the people on the future unites them as much as their ability to make the best out of nothing. I could feel the strength it takes to live on the edge, yet unknown to most of Europe.

contact:   email   web

Group Project: ALBANIA

What happens in Albania? The former closed Communist country with its long undiscovered coastline and spectacular Alpine interior retains an air of mystery in the midst of familiar old Europe. Albania is the close neighbour of Italy and Greece but, despite the fall of the Iron Curtain 20 years ago, has kept its secrets from us for too long.

This exhibition combines the work of six photographers based in Berlin, who for three years have been regularly exploring Europe’s least-known nation. They have immersed themselves in its unique and complex society successively moulded by the long period of Ottoman rule, the autocratic grip of communism and today by the excitement of emerging as a new democracy into modern Europe.

The idea of the project was to create a picture diary of a nation familiar by name but whose lifestyle, whose people and whose dreams are only slowly revealing themselves. Each of the photographers has followed his own unique approach to tell an unfolding story of discovery through images and other media.

This long-term project could never produce a straightforward narrative or even a journalistic documentation of a place as intriguing as Albania. Instead we offer six essays that build into a mosaic to capture what we found in a land just a short way away, but far from familiar.

• Georg Knoll
• Sebastián Laraia
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein
• Gilles Roudière
• Jan Zappner

All pictures were taken in
Cairo between 2009 and 2012

contact:   email   web

Group Project
SAFARI SIZE
Photographs from Cairo

Four photographic positions show a different and personal view on the Egyptian Metropol Cairo.
A subtle and personal presentation of reality connects the photographic document in all four works.

• Holger Biermann
• Georg Knoll
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein

The pictures were taken on 5 short-trips in different parts, mainly towns, of Albania. Huge Mountains and ancient traditions still mighty, as the heaviness of the weight of Hoxha’s dictaturship, it seems there was left a tabula rasa. This, in its resting Lethargie, has been filled in a cheap way with american and european status-symbols and its infrastructure. Not at least of the many emmigrants sending money home, there is a big affinity to the west. Daily life is very often a fight against poverty and corruption.
My photography is a short personal visual meeting with this country. Without any judgements I want to transfer the inspiration I got in this great Balcan-culture.

contact:   email   web

Group Project: ALBANIA

What happens in Albania? The former closed Communist country with its long undiscovered coastline and spectacular Alpine interior retains an air of mystery in the midst of familiar old Europe. Albania is the close neighbour of Italy and Greece but, despite the fall of the Iron Curtain 20 years ago, has kept its secrets from us for too long.

This exhibition combines the work of six photographers based in Berlin, who for three years have been regularly exploring Europe’s least-known nation. They have immersed themselves in its unique and complex society successively moulded by the long period of Ottoman rule, the autocratic grip of communism and today by the excitement of emerging as a new democracy into modern Europe.

The idea of the project was to create a picture diary of a nation familiar by name but whose lifestyle, whose people and whose dreams are only slowly revealing themselves. Each of the photographers has followed his own unique approach to tell an unfolding story of discovery through images and other media.

This long-term project could never produce a straightforward narrative or even a journalistic documentation of a place as intriguing as Albania. Instead we offer six essays that build into a mosaic to capture what we found in a land just a short way away, but far from familiar.

• Georg Knoll
• Sebastián Laraia
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein
• Gilles Roudière
• Jan Zappner

by Holger Biermann

I walked through this seemingly endless city in may 2009. These photographs suggest more than any of my words could possibly tell. It’s the gaze of a stranger, an aimless tourist prowling on the streets.

I weren’t on familiar terms with Cairo’s inhabitants. Their ideas, political or private views remained unknown to me. Mubarak ruled and that was it. To think of a radical change or a revolution seemed improbable to me then.

Once I got arrested for snapping a huge dark limousine in the parliament district. The cops confiscated my film and my camera before they locked me up. The precincts room was small and damp but orderly. I was sitting on a wooden chair and watched an incessant company of flies. After 2 hours the officer returned my camera and released me with an admonition back to the streets. But otherwise?

I remember vividly that the oppressive heat and a permanent diarrhea were too often master of the situation..

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Group Project
SAFARI SIZE
Photographs from Cairo

Four photographic positions show a different and personal view on the Egyptian Metropol Cairo.
A subtle and personal presentation of reality connects the photographic document in all four works.

• Holger Biermann
• Georg Knoll
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein

The photographs are of ordinary Albanian life. I wanted to capture the mood of the times and the realities of daily life. These photos focus inwards on the individual and outwards on the general milieu in the cities. They capture the interaction between people and their environment at work, at leisure and going about their daily lives. We see the asthetic juxtapose of socialist past and the newer touches of Western influences characterized by an explosion and bright colours and the sporadic introduction of new technologies.

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Group Project: ALBANIA

What happens in Albania? The former closed Communist country with its long undiscovered coastline and spectacular Alpine interior retains an air of mystery in the midst of familiar old Europe. Albania is the close neighbour of Italy and Greece but, despite the fall of the Iron Curtain 20 years ago, has kept its secrets from us for too long.

This exhibition combines the work of six photographers based in Berlin, who for three years have been regularly exploring Europe’s least-known nation. They have immersed themselves in its unique and complex society successively moulded by the long period of Ottoman rule, the autocratic grip of communism and today by the excitement of emerging as a new democracy into modern Europe.

The idea of the project was to create a picture diary of a nation familiar by name but whose lifestyle, whose people and whose dreams are only slowly revealing themselves. Each of the photographers has followed his own unique approach to tell an unfolding story of discovery through images and other media.

This long-term project could never produce a straightforward narrative or even a journalistic documentation of a place as intriguing as Albania. Instead we offer six essays that build into a mosaic to capture what we found in a land just a short way away, but far from familiar.

• Georg Knoll
• Sebastián Laraia
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein
• Gilles Roudière
• Jan Zappner

As one of the main axes the multi-level-street Sharia Ramses cuts a big part of central Cairo. On three short-trips I followed this „vene“, discovering parts of the arabian Megacity in the days before the revolution, winding between „Ramses“ and „Sharia“, 2006 to 2010.

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Group Project
SAFARI SIZE
Photographs from Cairo

Four photographic positions show a different and personal view on the Egyptian Metropol Cairo.
A subtle and personal presentation of reality connects the photographic document in all four works.

• Holger Biermann
• Georg Knoll
• Jan Michalko
• Andreas Pein

To feel much more the clarity of this unknown dream state. I went on a journey to photograph my dreams. These results show the moods and feelings that lead me around Romania, where as if in a trance state, I photographed what appeared and affected me.

In Dialogue with MICHAEL NARDONE – Published in BlackFlash Magazine, September 2014

http://soundobject.net/texts/michalko/

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All pictures were taken between 2002 and 2005
in the countries surrounding the black sea.

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