Werner Kaffl
What I do and the reasons behind it
First of all, photography is a very personal thing for me. My images don’t necessarily reflect everyone else’s reality. Everyone’s reality is different in any case, so I show people my personal reality rather than complying with certain sets of rules. Photography in general is a very wide field, and most photographers pick only a small portion. They specialize in what they really like. This small portion might also change over time.
I believe this time led the way to my photography and many related things like making my own props and all sorts of other things. Interesting is, even though I spent considerable time in my parents’ darkroom, I wasn’t much interested in photography itself, apart from the pure technical aspects – Well, even a point and shoot camera in this time costed a fortune.
Here is my personal story, which does have some major twists and detours. Best I start at the beginning. I was born on 23/02/1965, close to Munich, Bavaria, Germany.
So I steered my creative bursts into affordable directions, like making models and drawing. In the 1970s I started to build my own, AmericanChopper-like bicycles, mainly from scrap parts. Having a blacksmith in the neighboring village meant, I really constructed and built, not just assembled.
My mother was an immigrant from Croatia. She had a formal apprenticeship as a photographer. In that time they used mainly b&w film, but still also those old wooden boxes with a glass sheet in the back. She never worked in that field since I and my sister needed her full attention – This was in the mid 1960s, the reality at this time in Germany.
American Choppers were sort of popular in magazines during that time. They were usually elaborately painted with airbrush. Airbrushing was a popular photo retouching method as well, when my mum had her apprenticeship. So I learned a lot in that regard from her. I started to paint my friends’ motorcycles, my bikes, motorcycle helmets, surfboards.
My dad became a SLR enthusiast when I was around 6-7 years old. He also had his own little electrician company, rented a workshop area in Munich and used parts of it for his hobby and as a darkroom area. This workshop and my dad’s general craftsmanship were to become very important for me.
This time taught me a lot about using layers, which became very important to my editing processes in Photoshop some decades later.
Well, since his company was only starting up, there wasn’t much money. My dad was born in 1942, we don’t know where, and was adopted during WW2. He only learned of this some 10 years back and is still looking for his real family. This combination of facts meant, we didn’t have much money to spare for holidays or toys. Pencils and paper were affordable though, and, according to my parents, I used up the first pencils before I could even walk (my sister saved some of my first drawings). Since I was about 6 years old, I started to accompany my dad in his workshop whenever I could. His mentality was, as an adopted war kid, “if you want something, just make it”, and “don’t buy stuff until you can spare the money”. So basically he showed me how to use tools, wood, etc, to make my own toys.
Another important piece of the puzzle was me being sort of a loner. When all my friends were out together, I preferred to wander around in the nearby woods on my own, discovering nature and details around me. I believe, this keeping to myself in an early age later lead to a very real depression – or the other way around, I’m not sure. Depression and creativity seem to be linked though. I see both in many of my friends. I left school, had an apprenticeship as an Electrician, started smoking and drinking. After 15 years I finally managed to stop drinking, had another apprenticeship as an IT Systems Administrator, became a Systems Engineer. Anyway, as you can see, I’ve always been a creative and technology-interested person. But curiously I still wasn’t much interested in photography.
