Photography

I have a large database with many pictures shot with my many cameras over the last two decades, and I am more and more just using these pictures for my work. Postprocessing is done with photoshop or phase-one or sometimes with an audio-program called audacity. I like to combine them to see what happens between them when placed next to each other.

Railroad to Bralitz, part 2

There used to be a railroad going towards the parts of Poland that used to be German (former Eastern-Prussia?) and towards a village called Bralitz.

The second one which was most likely still active in the time the GDR still existed and was closed under capitalism.  This is what it looks like now – minus the small shed labeled F0 (toilet?). I planted that there from a photo I took at the Letschin Bahnhof Museum – as something that is left behind.

It is pretty wild there with  all that growth and near the small river there are a number of broken willow trees. This panorama was shot the second time I went there.

My main works are now focused around the idea of things that have been left behind. It kinda is like envisioning a world without humans. Under the growth there are lots of concrete bars – but the tracks have been taken. That is for the railroad towards Bralitz. The track going east had wooden bars, I know because one can find remnants of them. There are traces of us humans everywhere.

Transfer print on painted wood
Materials: MDF 5mm, metalic paint, toner
Dimensions: 30x44cm

‘Dukdalf’ or ‘Schorfheide in a future without humans’

‘Dukdalf’ or ‘Schorfheide in a future without humans’ – print on a painted surface, closeup and digital original. Photo’s made by yours truly. I just found out that the Dutch name ‘Dukdalf’ for a post for mooring boats actually came from the Spanish Duke the Alba (or Alfa in Dutch). We were at war with the Spanish for 80 years, starting int he 16th century. And it is a reference to him being a cruel tyrant and what the people in that day and age wanted to do with him…

Materials: wooden plate, paint, toner
Printing Technique: Transfer print / Digital Printmaking
Dimensions: 42x43cm

 

Last Day of Winter / First Wood / Near that Hill – exhibited during Hungerwinter/Romantique as part of #48HNK 2022

These are 4 large sized artworks (almost A0) and are all hand made prints/transfers made from digital files. The technique is similar to what is done with photocopies or laser prints with lithography but not the same.

My theme was Hungerwinter / Romantique – here is more info on the story behind the works and how it fitted in the main theme for #48HNK2022.

I was very satisfied with the result and the reactions of the public. For now this is the way I will print for some time to come. I will, however, try to find other ways to make handcrafted prints based on digital files. Maybe it is time for a manifesto.

Last Day of Winter

Materials: paint, black and white print, paint, 3mm MDF board with Fiber composite material ornament
Printing Technique: Transfer print / Digital Printmaking
Dimensions: 2 boards of 87x145cm

First Wood

Materials: paint, laser print paint, 3mm MDF board
Printing Technique: Transfer print / Digital Printmaking
Dimensions: 74x120cm

Near that Hill

Materials: paint, laser print paint, 3mm MDF board
Printing Technique: Transfer print / Digital Printmaking
Dimensions: 74x120cm

What I made for the ‘Lotto BrandenBurg Fotografie Preis 2022’

Materials: paint, laser prints (color / B&W), MDF
Printing Technique: Transfer print / Digital Printmaking
Dimensions: up to 33x45cm

Application text:

The theme that unites all my works is time. I use my own digital photos to create images that are usually part of larger artworks. What you see here are just the prints, made the way I am now doing more and more: transfer printing on painted surfaces and then disguise them as artifacts weathered by time. For me the printing process I use now with digital images, is as important as creating a print from a negative like I used to do in a darkroom.

The works I create that way are fake, they are forgeries of artworks that have never existed. Or maybe they will, one day, in the future.

To the rest of the text I send with the images…

Work in progress: Nature meets City I (2020-2021?)

This is growing into a new series: nature meets city – part cityscape part landscape.  Made a lot of cityscapes over the year and I started to notice two things that interested me the most. If I was working from a tower or so, those are mostly in the middle of the city – or what used to be an important point, like a harbor. And I had the tendency to zoom in on edge of the towns, its borders in the landscapes. Or, when standing outside of a city on a high place, I tended to focus on the borders from the other direction – or focus on patches of nature in the cities.

I know we can hardly call it nature with the anthropocene and all, but still.

Pictures taken in Hamburg and Berlin.

Flowers, plants

It is completely unintentional, but these images remind me of old school books with plants, herbaria  and such. Or is it herbariums? Ah, the curse of a classical education, always overthinking. Yes, I am old. No, I am not going to apologize for it!

Spots of light – or: Honey, I broke my lens

… or actually: I took apart my lens on purpose to see what would happen if I changed things. The end goal is to find a combination of parts that give the impression of what I see when I take off my glasses. The world without my glasses changes into a painting with moving parts and strange lights that are alive. This is not necessarily an impressionist painting, but very often it is. This can also be more cubist (Braque) or Surrealist (Ernst) because the brain has to find its own creative ways to make sens of the input. I am sometimes annoyed that photos are too clear, too precise, too sharp, too mechanical. Maybe that is why I like small sensor cameras like my beloved TZ81 and the LX7 that was stolen from me.

Scanner Camera Experiments

I have been working on a scanner camera in order to have a 100 megapixel camera on the cheap. This would be so great for floral elements and such, in ornamental works. Here are some of the results of the one I got to work – to bad it is kinda hard to make it focus correctly. 

Unfortunately this scanner crashed because of a short circuit (my bad) – and since then I did not really get it to work like this. I used a slightly different scanner, different software, different light and different lenses – and I have yet to find out what did it.

It is still standing in my room gathering dust – but the 80MM Pentacon 6 Medium Format Lens is welcome addition to my collection.