Photography Now by Pedro Pregioni

Photography Now

page 08

page 18

Interview with architecture photographer Andreas

The art of Wes Anderson

Gehrke, talking about carreer, inspirations and his

and his new film, The

thoughts about the nowadays photography market

Grand Hotel Budapest

Photography Now

Summary How my love for architec-

They shoot buildings,

ture photography changed

don’t they?

the way I see my city

The most viewed

Photography is about what’s in

photo of all time

your frame, not in your bag.

The grand design behind The

Andy Warhol’s Jackie

Grand Budapest Hotel

18 Life without a lens

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How my love for architecture photography changed the way I see my city

Article

Roaming a city you have never been before can be quite an experience. It’s different to the way you see your hometown. Everything is new and unfamiliar,

The main subject on Martin’s photos are the high buildings and its verticality, seen from below

maybe bigger or at least very different. Walking the city you pay more attention to everything around you. Your hometown is well known, you may know every street, every building, maybe grew up with most of them, saw some of them rise over the intervening years. Let’s compare that to the fact that we do guided tours on vacation for all kinds of sights or landmarks, to a greater or lesser intent interesting. But do we ever do that in our hometown? Do we actually know as much about it, do we actually know anything of interest about it except how to get to work and to this tapas bar around the corner? I have to admit that it was exactly what I used to do for years. But with my interest in mobile photography growing and later on my interest in architecture

‘the architecture photography brought me closer to my city’

photography growing, my interest in my own city began to grow as well. Not only that I walk roads and districts I never walked before, I now pay attention to nearly everything around me. Buildings, lines, how the buildings are composed and how everything is set up. I also prefer walking instead of taking the tube or tram, detours included. Walking the city I always look for buildings, lines, compositions. Walking close to and looking up those buildings to find a good composition. Sometimes I feel like a tourist in my own city, stopping by every now and then taking pictures with my iPhone. Which leads us back to the tourist argument again. Looking at all those people in the city, the tourists are the only ones paying attention to their surroundings. Most other people just go their way they know by heart, they could walk it blindfolded and some seem just as if they do. I really like the way I see my city now. I got to know it so much better. I’m very interested in it’s layout, it’s feel and it’s look. But I’m also much more interested in it’s history. Some weeks ago I even did two guided tours and visited some sights.

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Tem demodit, optiam sim facerum siti beatque placcus consecea necte parchit aligend itaecus accus experionsed facerum siti beatque placcus consecea necte parchit aligend itaecus accus experionsed

Article

As a tax auditor for the state I really have no clue about architecture in it’s technical details, technical terms, names of styles and so on. But what I do know is weather I think a structure is beautiful or not. I can tell weather the lines of a building fit to what I have in mind or not. And fortunately, my job is field work, so I can range the city nearly every day. On one hand my architecture photography brought me closer to my city but on the other hand my photography abstracts the city a lot. In order to get an interesting composition you can’t help yourself, you have to abstract the object a lot. So that would be the difference to the tourists then. Nearly all of my architecture shots include well known buildings, but seeing them as I place them in composition you can’t tell which one it is at first glance. Some works alienate the city that much, you realy don’t recognize it anymore. Letting it look much more futuristic as it is or it makes the buildings seem much bigger as they are. I also use to shoot perspectives many people never thought of looking from at the city. As architecture photographer you learn a lot about your city but you deliver a whole new point of view for all others. And that’s what architecture photography is for me. It’s all about showing new perspectives. It’s not only documenting architecture and buildings and styles. There’s more to it. It’s an abstract portrait of a city. What’s your experience?

Martin Dietrich is photographer and have a blog about Frankfurt, architecture, minimalism and other sorted stuff.

They shoot buildings donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t they? Interview with architecture photographer Andreas Gehrke

Interview

Times are tough for photographers: everyone thinks they can be a Jürgen Teller or a Martin Parr these days. Why should we pay someone to take some pictures

Andreas Gehrke, photographer and founder of Drittel Books

when we can do it ourselves with our smart phone or repost someone else’s images from the web? We have talked to architecture photographer Andreas Gehrke about the saturated market, his love of “slow capture” and setting up his own publishing company. Andreas Gehrke was born in Berlin in 1975. His career has bridged the gap between his art photography and commercial projects. Under the name “Noshe” he has been a regular contributor to the likes of Wallpaper and AD and shot buildings for publishers including Taschen and Hatje Cantz, whereas his alter ego Andreas Gehrke has exhibited his spare yet auraladen landscapes and building portraits in galleries ranging from Pierogi in Leipzig to PS1 in New York. Yet even Gehrke has not remained untouched by the changes that have drastically altered the practice and perception of photography over the past few years. Self-publishing, globally accessible image banks and the fact that millions now carry a high quality camera masquerading as a telephone in their trouser pocket have all taken their toll. But the biggest problem, in Gehrke’s view, lies in print. For hard hit publishing companies photography books are an expensive specialist niche market they can increasingly ill afford. So last year Gehrke decided to set up his own publishing company, Drittel Books, for his own works

‘millions now carry a high quality camera masquerading as a phone’

and those of colleagues that he has admiration. His first publications are a series of slim, carefully crafted volumes of his own visual essays on dormant modernist buildings that once hosted business enterprises playing a significant role in shaping the political, social and economic face of post-war Germany: Quelle, IBM and the newspaper Der Spiegel.

Did you set out to be architecture photographer? I have never differentiated between architecture, landscape or portrait. I don’t think it is important what you photograph, but how you photograph it. A good

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friend once said that he sees a portrait in everything that I shoot: be it a landscape, a building or a person.

What drew you to architecture as the subject of your work?

The Boros penthouse in Berlin by Realarchitektur and Jens Casper; “one of the most beautiful apartments that I have ever seen or photographed”

Growing up as a city kid in Berlin, I was always interested in my immediate surroundings: streets, corners, walls, derelict spaces and so on, that’s how photographers are. At the age of eleven I joined a photography club and a few years later I had my first exhibitions centred around the urban⁄rural theme. The distance

IBM Campus 1972-2009; Stuttgart, Vaihingen; architect Egon Eiermann

between nature and city is never far in Berlin.

When did you start working as a professional photographer? What was the work climate like then in your profession? I got my first commission in 1999 and it wasn’t long before I was able to earn a living from my photography.

Is it hard to earn a living in this now, if so why? Of course it is hard sometimes, but I would not want to switch places with my journalist colleagues or the architects either. It is the same everywhere. The market is saturated, there are far too many experienced photographers, and young talents…

Does the Internet and increasingly high-quality mobile devices mean the death of professional photography? I don’t think so. It is always the eye behind the camera that counts. Even when it has become technically so much easier to achieve a relatively satisfactory result you can usually see whether the photographer has devoted time to the subject or the medium, or not.

Who are your photographer heroes? The list could be endless, but the photographers that influenced me the most when I was younger were those that I got to know through their books: Michael Schmidt, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, John Gossage, August Sander, Richard Avedon...

Der Spiegel 1969-2011; Hamburg, Brandstwiete; architect Werner Kallmorgen

April 2014

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You have had books of your work published before, so what drove you to take the step towards setting up your own publishing company Drittel Books? The photography and art book market has really changed a lot. There is a varied and of course interesting range on offer but at the same time the print runs are dropping. This makes it hard for publishers to finance smaller projects. That means that artists today have to finance production themselves with their own money – or that of a sponsor. I will most likely continue to self-publish my own projects in the future. But that will only work if the small editions that I have published so far sell successfully. I also hope to publish more works by my colleagues again, like the recent book ‘galerie berlintokyo’ that I did with Martin Eberle. Drittel Books is intended to be a platform for contemporary photography. But I have to be realistic and see to it that the organisation of it all remains manageable.

What advice would you give to photographers wanting to work in the world of architecture? Use a tripod!

What advice would you give to architects wanting to have their buildings photographed? Give the photographer the freedom to look at and photograph the building using their own eye. That doesn’t mean you can’t still give concrete specifications, I always find it interesting to see how architects view and understand their own buildings.

Another photographer who has a passion for abandoned spaces, Robert Polidori, said at a talk in Berlin recently: “I like the reproducibility of digital, but its capture is brittle and not so great. With digital you take the picture to expurgate it out of your life, with film you take a picture to keep it.” Would you agree? I still shoot my personal work exclusively analogue with a 4 x 5 plate camera. It’s the process, the rapprochement with the place and the slow capture

April 2014

I love. The camera forces you to concentrate on the motif, I love the intensity of that concentration. Also itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s softer in the highlights than digital. On the other hand I totally enjoy the advantages of the digi-

IBM Campus 1972-2009; Stuttgart, Vaihingen; architect Egon Eiermann

tal process, the speed and it can produce excellent results. In the commercial world, no client has time for the analogue process anymore.

You have shot a lot of buildings over the past 14 years - do you have a favourite? I am still inspired by the concept and realisation of the Boros Collection building in a former bunker here in Berlin and the penthouse on the roof by Realarchitektur and Jens Casper is one of the most beautiful apartments that I have ever seen or photographed.

Sophie Lovell is a freelance writer, editor, curator and consultant in the fields of architecture and design.

The most viewed photo of all time

You may not know the name Charles O’Rear, but if you’ve used a PC in the last decade, you’re familiar with his photo. The 73-year-old photog is the man behind the tranquil image of a rolling hill and bright blue sky that served as the default background for Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. To mark the end of the Windows XP era — Windows stopped offering support for it on April 8 — Microsoft made a video about O’Rear and his famous snapshot. He explains in the video:

There was nothing unusual. I used a film that had more brilliant colors, the Fuji Film at that time, and the lenses of the RZ67 were just remarkable. The size of the camera and film together made the difference and I think helped the Bliss photograph stand out even more. I think if I had shot it with 35 millimeter, it would not have nearly the same effect. He later sold the image Corbis, which was actually started by Bill Gates, to be used as stock art, it then caught the eye of Microsoft. Carriers wouldn’t accept the liability of transporting the original photograph because of the undisclosed value Microsoft put on it, so the company eventually sent O’Rear a plane ticket so he could deliver it in person. In the clip, O’Rear shares that a group of Microsoft engineers had a bet going about where the photograph was taken and whether it was Photoshopped (he says it wasn’t). He also talks about seeing the image everywhere from the Bliss, the image that became the desktop of every single Windows XP computer in the world.

White House to the Kremlin and about how it will

Victoria Taylor, is a lifestyle reporter of fashion, food and health, but also writes the occasional general news.

website or trought our app for iOS and Androd.

live on after XP. You can see the full interview video in our

Photography is about what’s in your frame, not in your bag. The best way to make the worst possible picture is to find a nice place, set up your tripod with the best possible camera, level the camera and carefully adjust everything to perfection, then photograph it with the sharpest possible lens with the highest possible dynamic range, resolution, color depth and gamut, all to get the most accurate and exact possible picture. It’s exactly the same with photography: what’s in the photograph is far more important than how the photograph was made. The message matters, not the medium. It’s not about pixel size, color space or bit depth. It’s all about line, shape, form, color, balance, texture and tone. It’s about new points-of-view, not about shooting at tripod or eye-level height.Photography is all about what’s in your frame, not what’s in your bag. It’s all about moving yourself and seeing something worth seeing, in the strongest possible way. Get closer! We do far better when we are worrying about our pictures and compositions, and not about our cameras. I mean, duh, if you’re shooting digital, there’s a screen on the back of your camera. You know if you got your picture immediately, and if it didn’t take, you

Concept

can try again. Double duh. The real issue is finding something interesting to photograph in an interesting way. The easy part is setting your camera’s exposure and white balance. When shooting, we should be paying attention to what’s in our frames, and paying attention to the critical basics that make a strong image. Better pictures come from staying out a little longer, walking a little farther, climbing a little higher, stooping a little lower, and then walking 360º around our intended subject to see things from the strongest and simplest point of view. Please forget about the garbage not related to photography. Subpixel calculations, microgauss slopes, convolutional kernels, color coefficients, Camera doesn’t matter: Plaubel Makina 67, 4 minutes at f/4, Fuji Velvia 120. 25 July 1993

quantization matrices, and discrete cosine transforms have nothing to do with photography; leave them to the cubicle-bound engineers designing our cameras. They worry about this stuff so we don’t have to. Photography is all about our imaginations. It’s all about showing us something new or in a new way, and then designing the elements in your frame for the strongest, simplest, best-balanced and most exciting composition. I made this snap in Mono Lake about 15 minutes after dark, after my other photographer friends had already packed it in, knowing the sunset show was over. It had been a long day of shooting, and they wanted to head to dinner.I hoped that maybe something interesting would happen later, as had been happening with the atmospheric distortions brought about by the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo. I lucked out, and the sky actually turned this shade of magenta, while my pals had their dinner at The Charthouse in Mammoth a half hour before I did. Memorable photos come from showing things worth remembering: things out of the ordinary. Ken Rockwell, is photographer and have a blog where he posts his aggressive personal opinions about photography.

The grand design behind The Grand Budapest Hotel

Every so often in our culture, an artist arrives with Scene in the caracteristic ultra red saturated elevator of the hotel. The movie was awarded with the world premiere at the 2014 Berlin film festival last february.

a body of work so dense and allusive it encourages his followers to scour and dissect it for clues, insights and meaning. Two decades ago, the films of Quentin Tarantino (and especially their dialogue) received this respectful treatment; back in the late 1960s, the enigmatic lyrics of Bob Dylan came under a similar degree of surveillance. These days, American writer-director Wes Anderson, whose eighth feature film The Grand Budapest Hotel opened yesterday, comes closest. Yet unlike Dylan and Tarantino, his work does not enjoy widespread popularity. To date, only The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) has scraped past $50 million in US grosses. It doesn’t matter: to his most avid fans, Anderson is a figure of wonder and a source of huge, closely observant interest. His is an almost cultish appeal. Why should this be? Largely because of his idiosyncratic scripts and shooting style. The dandyish Anderson creates worlds that look superficially like reality, but in truth are neater, more symmetrical and yet quirkier. He’s a fastidious film-maker, and an extraordinary amount of care goes into each scene he shoots. Indeed, there’s something obsessive-compulsive about his approach – and fellow-obsessives among his fan base find his work irresistible. For instance, he clearly likes worlds with right-angles. Long tracking shots moving horizontally in a dead straight line are among Anderson’s stylistic signatures. Also his camera frequently zooms in on people or objects frontally, sometimes panning straight back. He’s not a man for curves. There’s a perfect example of Anderson’s rectilinear preferences in The Grand Budapest Hotel, set in a mythical European country in the Twenties and Thirties. A painting is seen hanging on a wall, a few degrees off centre. A character steps forward and adjusts it. Could this be Anderson mocking his own compulsions? One imagines so.

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He also frames his stories within different forms of proscenium arches. In Rushmore (1998), set in an elite prep school, Anderson uses curtains to support the conceit that we’re watching a story directed by 15-year-old Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), the school’s imaginative, effortlessly brilliant slacker and king of extra-curricular activities. In its opening scene Max solves the world’s toughest geometry problem on a classroom blackboard – in his dreams. Similarly, Moonrise Kingdom (2012) starts with another form of framing device – tracking shots through the house lived in by Suzy, a teenage girl who is one half of the film’s romantic central couple. Anderson’s cameras move up, down and sideways throughout her home, rendering it almost like a doll’s house. In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), which features a legendary oceanographer clearly inspired by Jacques Cousteau, his research vessel, the Belafonte, is viewed in cross-section with all its areas (lounge, sauna, engine room, observation bubble) designed to Anderson’s highly specific instructions. It’s another self-contained world. Novelist Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) likens Anderson’s films to “the boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell”, and it’s a thoughtful comparison. To list all Anderson’s tics, idiosyncrasies and recurring motifs would require a book. Happily, there’s one available: The Wes Anderson Collection, a sumptuous coffee-table volume containing long, detailed interviews with Anderson about his first seven films, conducted by American critic Matt Zoller Seitz. It also offers storyboards and illustrations drawn by Anderson himself, as well as references to other films that influenced him, even down to the way he composed or used a single shot or scene. What the book reveals is the extent to which everyone in Anderson’s films has an inner life, and a comprehensive back-story. Effectively what we see on screen of each character is the tip of the iceberg:

To list all Anderson’s tics, idiosyncrasies and recurring motifs would require a book.

Anderson has thought through their traits, obsessions, favourite music and/or books in astonishing detail. This eye for detail lends itself to scholarship – from

What is the meaning of the pinks and purples in The Grand Budapest Hotel?

The Grand Budapest Hotel alone, one could write a mini-thesis on the meaning of pinks and purples in the film’s colour palette. Another essay might tackle the incidence of perfect symmetry in various shots in the film, which Anderson slyly takes to absurd lengths – he and Jude Law even posed for a publicity photo wearing virtually identical suits, and are seated on chairs in precisely the same pose. They’re almost a mirror image of each other. All of which fuels the director’s mystique. But Anderson’s trademark tics are also perfect targets for parody. It’s long been noted by his devotees that for years he used the Futura font on his films’ titles and posters. (Anderson is a man of just the sort of precious refinement to have a favourite font.) But he deviated from the norm for Moonrise Kingdom, adopting a new custom-designed font, and for The

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“Tilda, as the elderly Madame D. Tilda put on her lipstick in three brisk strokes: two on the top lip, one across the bottom. She said it was her grandmother’s system.”Photography by Martin Scali

Cinema

Grand Budapest Hotel has employed a little-known font, Archer. Such matters are gravely noted and commented upon by his fans. These same people know that the expensive luggage with a safari design, carried by the three brothers (Schwarzman, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody) aboard the Indian train in The Darjeeling Limited (2007), was a limited collection designed by Louis Vuitton. They know the story-telling of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was an inspiration for Anderson in writing The Grand Budapest Hotel; and some may even know his enthusiasm for Zweig is shared by England’s erudite football manager Roy Hodgson. (One imagines this may be all the two men have in common.) Taking this enthusiasm for detail to a logical conclusion, the American online magazine Slate devised “Wes Anderson bingo”, which invites audiences to spot and tick off recurring motifs in his films as they appear on screen. These include pyjamas, the use of binoculars, sibling rivalry, a dead or estranged parent, knitted hats, yellow titles, vintage British pop (especially The Kinks) and the recurrent appearances of favourite actors in Anderson’s informal repertory company, including Bill Murray and brothers Owen and Luke Wilson. Wes Anderson Bingo is a witty idea which doesn’t truly detract from the films, which are without exception as moving and deeply felt as they are playful and somewhat obsessive. And ultimately, they’re a tribute to a hugely original career: how many other directors’ bodies of work could withstand such amused scrutiny?

David Gritten, has been writing about films, film-makers and musicians for the past 20 years.

Andy Warhol’s Jackie The artist’s portraits of the former first lady are on exhibit together for the first time

22, 1963, the whole nation became enthralled by the media coverage—including artist Andy Warhol. “He was handsome, young, smart, but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead,” Warhol once said. “What bothered me was the way television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing.” Warhol found himself most affected by the face of Kennedy’s widow Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy—from her smile before gunshots rang out at Dallas’s Love Field to her devastated look at the president’s funeral. The following February, he began what would eventually become a series of over 300 portraits of the first lady, appropriated from images in the media. Now, the first exhibition centered around those works, “Warhol: Jackie,” is on view at Blain|Di Donna gallery in New York. “Warhol,” says Emmanuel Di Donna, the gallery’s director, made Jackie “even more of an icon by focusing on her face.” Perhaps the most moving of the more than one dozen silkscreened portraits on display is a collection of nine white, black, and blue images that juxtapose her facial expressions before and after her husband’s death. “It’s just so pure and minimal but so effective

Ann Binlot, has been writing about fashion, art and trend topics for the past 5 years.

and powerful,” says Di Donna. “Warhol: Jackie” is on view at Blain|Di Donna, 981 Madison Avenue, New York, through May 17.

Life without a lens Sebnem Ugural captures the state of womanhood with a time-intensive, but beautiful, process.

Two years ago, Sebnem Ugural created a camera out of a matchbox. She had to destroy it to remove and process the film, but was instantly intrigued by the time-intensive, often unrewarding process. The 33-year-old from Turkey now works with a couple of

The process differs with every different camera and lighting condition. The long exposure and movent are the key elements for this photo

other models: she has upgraded to a pin-hole chocolate box, has a shoebox version and a more portable beer can camera. Ugural has created them all herself before beginning the process of learning how each one works. For rudimental objects, they each have nuances of their own. “I’d start to look at all sorts of objects and see them as cameras”, she tells me, “but every time you make a new one, you have to start knowing it again. Learning how their dimensions differ, how they affect the changing light.” In a world where images can be taken and uploaded around the world in seconds, Ugural’s pin-hole process seems neanderthal. The half a dozen beautiful, ghostly photographs she shows me are the results of hundreds of failed images. Depending on the light, she will sit for a self-portrait for up to 30 minutes before processing the film in her bathroom in her Hackney flat. “Usually each photograph takes 45 minutes from start to processing”, she says. “Sometimes I use two different cameras at the same time - but generally I can create five or six images a day.” When it works, as Ugural’s work demonstrates, the results are deeply atmospheric and show all the

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marks of their creation: the beer can images curve the surroundings they capture, a sunny day leaves a contrast worthy of noir cinema. When it doesn’t, it is a day wasted. Ugural once meticulously set up a camera with 21 pinholes, with only two photos as a result. Smiling, she explains: “You learn through the process, so your purpose becomes the process instead of the outcome. What can I do? if it doesn’t come out it’s fine, I’ll try something different.” Ugural is self-taught, which may explain her relaxed attitude to failure. Originally from Eskisheir, Turkey, she has worked as a freelance photographer since 2006, but moved to the UK in 2009 to complete an MA in Human Rights. Ugural also volunteers for a number of NGOs, helping the plight of women from different communities seeking refuge from war-torn countries and domestic violence. Most recently she worked on the advice team of Solace Women’s Aid, a grass roots charity in London, talking directly to women in need on their phonelines, or sometimes just listening, she says, “because sometimes there is nothing to say”. This background resulted in her inclusion in the Spirit of Womanhood Exhibition,. Organised by the Women’s Interfaith Network to celebrate their 10th anniversary, the show is on at London’s South Bank and includes narrative pieces from women around the world. Ugural’s work considers her studies, but reflects on womanhood by being a mirror of herself, too. “I describe myself as a woman”, she says, “but I like to take self portraits to understand myself better - not only physically but psychologically as well”. The long exposure times capture every movement of her sitting - from walking over to her pose after opening the pin hole, to constantly adjusting her posture. “Pin hole photographers have to learn how to be patient. Nowadays we are in a rush all the time. But there’s an unpredictability of the photography”, she says. “It’s like life, you don’t know what to expect.”

Alice Vincent loves covering entertainment news and writes features about movies, music, books and art.