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
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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)
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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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Emser Strasse 117, 12051 Berlin, Germany
open 17march – 08may, tuesday to friday, 2 – 6 pm
http://www.photography-in.berlin
http://neukoellnerleuchtturm.de
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Street Photography from Eastern Europe.
3-30 October 2013 in Lublin, Poland.
http://eastreet.eu
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Title: LEAVING TODAY. 44 pages in postcard format.
Contents: 41 street scenes from New York City in black-and-white and color.
Price: 7 euros (plus dispatch). Order email send to: info@holger-biermann.de
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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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oslo8 – contemporary photography
We are looking forward to see you all at Jiri’s opening in Basel. He is showing images from New York. At the same time, it is the book launch for his new book “From the Island”.
On this evening Jirka is also dj – ing with DJ M.B.Un. To celebrate this night, Jiri’s friends and brothers will bring fresh beer from Prag!
Opening: thursday june 6 2013, 6 pm
exhibition june 7 – august 24 2013
opening hours gallery
friday/saturday 2 pm – 6 pm or by arrangement
summer break july 14 – august 8
opening hours during art basel
monday june 10 – saturday june 15, 10 am – 7 pm
oslo8
contemporary photography
kunstfreilager
oslostrasse 8-10
postfach
4053 basel
+41 61 272 58 58
www.oslo8.ch
contact@oslo8.ch
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)
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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
– 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
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Photographs by Corinna Sauer, Sebastián Laraia, Jeffrey Ladd, Holger Biermann, Shinji Abe, Patrick Becker, Jiri Makovec, Dimitri Mellos, Richard Sandler, Gilles Roudière, Roger Minick, Jan Zappner, Georg Knoll, Andreas Pein, Jan Michalko, Jonathan van Smit, Jia Jia Zhang, hannah goldstein and Charlie Jouvet.
at TÊTE art space in Berlin 15 march 2013
artist talks 20 march 2013 – Jan Zappner, Corinna Sauer and Holger Biermann
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infos at http://www.tete.nu
opening: 15 march 2013
gallery weekend: 16 / 17 march
artist talks: 20 march
TÊTE
Schönhauser Allee 161A
10435 Berlin / Germany
hannah goldstein
http://www.hannahgoldstein.net
MIRAPROSPEKT group exhibition
Photographs by Corinna Sauer, Sebastián Laraia, Jeffrey Ladd, Holger Biermann, Shinji Abe, Patrick Becker, Jiri Makovec, Dimitri Mellos, Richard Sandler, Gilles Roudière, Roger Minick, Jan Zappner, Georg Knoll, Andreas Pein, Jan Michalko, Jonathan van Smit, Jia Jia Zhang, hannah goldstein and Charlie Jouvet.
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http://miraprospekt.tumblr.com
Follow on twitter : @miraprospekt
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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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TAKE TWO: The Post-Sandy opening of the South Street Seaport Museum. Tuesday, January 15, 2013 from 6:30 to 9:30 pm
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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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info: http://www.prospektphoto.net
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organized by Corinna Sauer, Frederico Azevedo and Germán Peraire
“We are three photographers from different countries of Europe that decided to make Berlin our home. This city is where we met, where we started to develop the idea for our common project and where we became friends. echtzeit projekt is built on this mutual idea, our passion for photography and our companionship.”
The project:
Placed in the heart of Berlin, echtzeit projekt provides a meeting place for emerging international photographers and an opportunity to work alongside photography masters. Hosting workshops with renowned experts, echtzeit projekt is an organization founded for the purpose of helping the new generation of photographers to develop.
In workshops in the center of Berlin’s vibrant artistic community, participants will have the opportunity to confront their photographic voices. They will also study and work with other upcoming artists from all over the world.
Through facilitating these international connections among both emerging artists and masters, echtzeit projekt hopes to support the growth and development of the photography of tomorrow.
web: http://www.echtzeitprojekt.com
email: info@echtzeitprojekt.com
Interview with Gomma magazine:
http://www.gommamag.com
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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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Upcoming exhibitions:
LICHTENBERG by Holger Biermann
15 aug to 11 sept
NICE TRY by Jan Michalko
12 sept to 16 okt
FENSTER61 (“WINDOW61″) uses an approx. 2 by 2 meter shop window in the very busy Torstraße, near subway Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin Mitte. Since 2005 photographers are presented in monthly changing exhibitions with works that more or less deal with Berlin.
FENSTER61 is not a gallery. FENSTER61 doesn’t have opening hours, since the visitor is in a public space. The window is lit at night.
FENSTER61.DE documents and archives the exhibitions.
Location // Torstraße 61, 10119 Berlin/Germany
U-Bahn: U2 Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, U8 Rosenthaler Platz
Tram: M8 // Bus: 240
LICHTENBERG by Holger Biermann
Lichtenberg begins where Holger Biermann’s Berlin tours usually end: behind Ostkreuz. Where the vast emptiness begins. Where he rarely encounters other people in the street. Dimensions are large. People have and leave one another plenty of space. He roams by himself through the tower block meadows, through allotment gardens and along private streets. At the city limits, Lichtenberg is all field and village. This is the story his photographs tell.
NICE TRY by Jan Michalko
For years, Jan Michalko has been roaming the streets with his camera. Always trying to find the unusual in the usual, always in analogue format, always on 28 mm. His style relies on coincidences and moments in which the prevailing chaos fuses into visual units. When asked about the driving force behind his work, he tells you: It is about images. We get the feeling that it is not just about images, but about constantly trying to find the one, the subjectively perfect image. And the answer to the question about the results of the day has long become a catchphrase: “Nice Try!”.
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The Museum of Photography in Görlitz
Exhibition from 28 july to 24 August 2012
Löbauer Straße 7, 02826 Görlitz/Germany
located at the former ground of the camera
manufacture Ernst Herbst & Firl, producer of
atelier- and travel cameras between 1893 and 1919.
Exhibition of photographs seen on miraprospekt.com by Patrick Becker, Holger Biermann, Georg Knoll, Sebastián Laraia, Jan Michalko, Andreas Pein,
Gilles Roudière and Jan Zappner
The Museum of Photography in Görlitz / Germany
Opening 27 july 2012, 7 pm
Exhibition runs from 28 july to 24 August 2012
at Galerie des Museums der Fotografie
Löbauer Straße 7, 02826 Görlitz
located at the former ground of the camera
manufacture Ernst Herbst & Firl, producer of
atelier- and travel cameras between 1893 and 1919.
Exhibition of photographs seen on miraprospekt.com by Patrick Becker, Holger Biermann, Georg Knoll, Sebastián Laraia, Jan Michalko, Andreas Pein,
Gilles Roudière and Jan Zappner
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22 June to 16 September 2012
The Albanian Ambassador in Vendome:
> read the article (in french only)