Lassal – photography
I admit, I waited 2 hours for the sun to hit the top part of the building in a way that would make it reflect in the ice on the pond in the otherwise still unlit backyard. I got a glimpse of the effect yesterday and hoped to get a shot at it today. Thankfully it is cold and sunny again.
Almost forgot my birthday. Thanks to Tone and friends I did not. But worked through it nonetheless. Meeting family today – will party with friends later in the year. It is time to slow down.
Even if it is just artificial, if feels like a turning point.
Worked until 7am yesterday and until 5am this morning. Not healthy. Definitively no turning point there yet.
Same as on December 29, only with much worse weather conditions.
I hope this is no bad omen.
I took this image as part of a series in 2009 while Tone and I visited the small town of Lobo in Texas. It was totally out of fun. I wanted to see if I could get a U2 kinda feeling into them … Maybe because I was a bit tired to listen to Graceland Radio throughout the day.
It gave birth to an idea, Overtone, which I am working on since then.
There is nothing like playing around a bit to make you happy!
It was born over a century ago as a healthy “18×13″.
Just booked a summer workshop in England to learn how to feed it with Collodion … and I have yet to find out how to get the chemicals here in Germany.
Cannot wait!!!
While I do not believe that everything in a project should be explained away, I got so extremely many emails asking why most of the night/day pictures in the diptychs for Disencounters look so much the same regarding light situation, that … well … I might as well show you our bed, too.
Tone has designed it himself and had it build by experts. It really does remind one of a two piece Donald Judd sculpture. Two “C”s that you can put together in any variation that you wish. And we have so far chosen the anti-dog variation – which gives us a closed double bed and which also goes well with the moskito net that has been proven necessary during the last years – even if it is a bit tricky to get in and out.
So you can see that with the room lights turned off it will always be more or less dark in there. All of the pictures in that “box” had to be made with a low flash, thus the similarities between the day & night images.
And the dog stays out.
(There are other sets of pictures, which were made in other beds, which I guess is quite easy to recognize now.)
David Alan Harvey sent me a note today, that “Disencounters” was up on BURNmagazine. What a nice surprise!
We had talked about Disencounters since November 2010, when I was not yet sure about how long I would still be shooting for it. It turned out that I was almost done. Thankfully.
I then opened up about the series, told Tony about it and asked if he would mind not only to shoot the final diptych for me but also to have the images published. Thankfully he is a good sport with a wonderful and strong personality and very supportive of my work.
So while on 81 diptychs you see Tony’s side of the bed – with or without him – I asked him to turn the tables and shoot me in a similar way for the final image on the final day. So there I am, sleeping the day away …
The images for the series were shot on consecutive days. There are only two nights missing, and that was when I went to ParisPhoto by myself. I even shot while Tony was in England for his construction site, leaving me an empty bed behind.
In these 82 nights we had a lot of unplanned scenarios: we had a sick dog, who had us sleep on the sofa with him, I had a sick boyfriend, who went to bed with a plastic bowl and towel – just in case –, and we had travelling times, when I simply took the camera with me.
David Alan Harvey thought that an edit of 20 pictures would do to get the point across on BURN and I gave him all the 82 picturs to make a selection. The only image I thought important to have in, was the last one in that very last position, which Tony did of me. Otherwise I was very curious which 19 he would select to go before that. On one hand side it is easy, because we have just variations of the same thing in the pictures, but on the other side, if you want to choose a selection without regard to the order, then there are several possible roads to travel.
To see David Alan Harvey’s selection for BURNmagazine, please visit BURNmagazine.
To see the whole set of 82 images, you can go to the Project “Disencounters” on this site.
Feedback (by email) is always welcome.
Thank you so much for your time!
This picture of the backyard shows a bit how the new year feels to me right now: yet not exposed properly, yet undefined. Not in a bad sense, only in the sense that there are many possibilities yet to work on. I like this feeling: It is freedom!
But to have freedom is one thing – to use it wisely is another animal completely.
If there is one lesson that I hopefully learned in the past year, it is that there is never the perfect time for anything – or at least hardly ever. If you want to do something, do not wait for the perfect time, but make it BE the perfect time. Otherwise the chances are high, that you will end up not doing it at all.
Last year I spent too much time waiting for “right” constellations or for the “right” moods & feelings. Ok, I had the excuse of being sick and having to sleep most of the day, but … if the sickness had been more threatening and 2010 my last year alive, there would have been a lot of things I would have missed by having waited for the arrival of better times. Sometimes there will never be a better opportunity than what is right in front of your nose. And you better not waste it.
And, upon request, this one goes to my “dark” friends …
No more complainin’, ‘k? Plzzzzz!
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