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Berlin 2006

This image was taken during an assignment for Berliner Morgenpost/Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. It’s five years ago now and I remember that day very well. The job was to visualize the four elements fire, water, air and earth in Berlin. I was working with a fire juggler, a model on a swing and a “borrowed” idea of Andreas Burger’s Berlin Postcard series. Of course the only interesting photograph for me today is this one that wasn’t staged up. However, the layouter cropped all of the images very roughly – in this case he simply cut off the right part of it which made the first publication of the image look like that:

Wow! I was very enthusiastic about it…

Later the original photograph became part of some urban b’sides exhibitions and the Ankunft Bei Aufbruch book.

As a part of the Indie Photobook Library, my book ALEX is on exhibition at the New York Photo Festival this weekend like it was at the snap! Festival in Orlando, Florida last weekend. So if you should be around Dumbo…

Found this thread in a forum while googleing myself the other day. It’s interesting to read discussions like that about your own work and YES it should never be the intention to be everybody’s darling ;-)

Image from my book ALEX.

Some of the screenings that were shown at the Seconds2Real event at exp12 Gallery in February are now online on vimeo. This video was shown as an intro to the evening and contains photographs from all Seconds2Real members as well as some thoughts about what the term “street photography” means to us.

See you on Saturday!

Since I joined Seconds2Real at the end of last year friends and photo buddies are asking me questions like „What is that? Just a website or what? How can that work as you all come from different cities? What are your plans and aims?“ Seconds2Real is quite popular in the online street photographer scene but the offline world often doen’t know about the co-operative at all.

On Feb. 12 there’ll be an evening with Seconds2Real at exp12 Gallery in Berlin. Guido Steenkamp, Thorsten Strasas, me (all from Berlin), Andreas Stelter (Minden), Mario Cuic (Munic), Siegfried Hansen (Hamburg), Natalie Opocensky (Vienna) will introduce their works and the concept of Seconds2Real in open discussion with the audience. Detail information soon on blog61 and of course on the Seconds2Real website.

Every year I produce a small edition of calendars to give them to friends and customers as a christmas gift. This year it features parts of the Londoners series and there are some copies left. So why not give them to you? Here comes the big blog61 Xmas Competition: Win 1 of 10 calendars for 2011!

All you have to do is send your complete postal address to win@blog61.com. Deadline is December, 31th. I’ll cast lots within the fist days of the new year. Good Luck!

PS: Feel free to share the link to this competition on any social network or blog.
PPS: Of course your address will NOT be used for anything except for the competition.

UPDATE 2011-01-03: The winners have been allotted. I won’t publish any names here – just check your mailbox for it. The calendars go to Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands and Spain. Thanks to all participants. Happy 2011!

Seconds2Real published a nice review about ALEX last week – now they are running an ALEX competition. Click here to find out how you can win a copy of ALEX. If you shouldn’t be lucky to win one you still have the chance to order one ;-)

Had a great opening party last night at refugium 2 with a few hundred people visiting the neunplus exhibition Mittelpunkt der Welt. My ALEX book was delivered just in time – so: it is OUT NOW!

4th European Month of Photography in Berlin
Mittelpunkt der Welt [Center of the World]
neunplus at galerie weißer elefant / refugium 2

The exhibition presents photographs of Nikolaus Brade, Piero Chiussi, Lina Gruen, Fred Hüning, Klaus Muenzner, Christian Reister and Mirjam Siefert.

Opening + Release of my book ALEX : 16.10.2010, 19 h
Duration of the exhibition: 17.10. – 13.11.2010
Opening times: Di-Sa 13-19 h
Location: neunplus in der galerie weißer elefant / refugium 2
Auguststraße 21 (2ed floor) / 10117 Berlin / T 0049 30 28884454

More information on the neunplus website and the 4th European Month of Photography in Berlin website.

The incubator of ALEX. Printed today. Will the finishing be done until Oct, 16th? 99,99% YES. Book presentation will be at the opening of the exhibition MITTELPUNKT DER WELT. Part of the 4th European Month of Photography in Berlin.

The editing is finished, the layout is complete, the text is written and translated and I did the very final art work this morning. So I brought all print data for the book to Hannes Wanderer today. Hannes Wanderer is a photographer, a publisher, a book shop owner and also cares for the print productions of a print shop near Hannover where ALEX will be printed.

It was important for me to have a photo book specialist producing the book that I can ask questions about all concerns of making a book and preventing me from doing silly things that wouldn’t work in a printed format. A big advantage over any internet printing service about the choosen print shop is that there is no limit concerning sizes and papers. So you can basically do what you want. My book will be 24cm wide and 14cm high which isn’t a regular size on any „out of the box“ printing service. It will have an offset printed hardcover and stitched binding. And I will stand right next to the printing machine when the first paper comes out. Except for the cover, the book will be printed digitally at high state of the art quality. The release date should be Oct. 16th along with the opening of the Mittelpunkt Der Welt-Exhibtion at refugium II in Auguststraße, Berlin.

No man is an island and it’s good to have some „experts“ involved in the production of a book. I think every photographer knows that it can become very difficult judging your own work if you work on a project over and over again.

I’m happy that Falk Schreiber, a journalist from Hamburg who wrote a decent article about the project a year ago will write the introduction. I think he really understood what ALEX is all about and finds better words for it than me. Writing the introduction to my own photobook myself turned out to be an odd idea.

Concerning layout, selection of the photographs and sequencing them my friend and former photography teacher Andreas Rost brought in some really important impulses. The original format and layout is history now and I’m very grateful that he pushed the book to some stronger level. Hope we can finish the editing during the next week.

This image shows an early dummy version of the book – title rejected, format rejected – this is NOT how the book will look like.

Next steps will be defining the right paper, getting the files in the right data format and so on. And I’m happy to have another expert for that. Will tell you later…

The first pictures of my ALEX series were taken in the summer of 2008. I had just bought a new camera at Alexanderplatz and took my first few test shots there. Alexanderplatz isn’t far from where I live, so I went there from time to time in my lunch break – always with my new small camera with a 24mm wideangle lens. A few weeks later while looking at the pictures I had taken there, I realised that this might be an exciting project to keep working on. In the years before I had been travelling a lot – mainly to big cities of the western word until I finally had the first compilation of my Urban B’Sides together which were shown in some exhibitions in 2008. So this would be a nice contrast – instead of taking pictures around the globe I would just walk to the same place over and over again to see what was happening there. Alexanderplatz – Berliners simply call the place „Alex“ – is a very lively and busy square with lots of different kinds of people – it’s a microcosmos in its own right in the central district „Mitte“ of Berlin. And a perfect stage for my photographs.

After half a year I was offered the possibility to show a first interim conclusion of my ALEX series at Monochrom, Berlin. The reactions were surprising – the range of feedback I got, went from „Absolutely Bullshit“ to „Brilliant – your best work ever“. So this was a real motivation for me to keep going on with that project. If it provokes such different feelings it would be a good idea to go a bit further.

I always thought that the right way to present those images would be in a book. By the end of last year I produced a first dummy. This worked out quite well, but still not good enough. The printing wasn’t really striking and the editing was not yet distinct enough. I went on taking pictures at Alexanderplatz and after thinking about how to produce and how to publish the book this summer, the decision was made to produce it in time for a release in autumn this year when ALEX will be part of a group show during The 4th European Month of Photography in Berlin.

Writing a decent preface seems to be as difficult as editing the pictures perfectly. This is the stage that the book is now at. I think I’ll write a view posts about the development of it here on blog61 – so this will tell a story about the pleasure but also the problems in producing my first photo book.