At this point I want to thank the amazing organization team from LOOK3 for their seemingly supernatural efforts. It was PERFECT! Just as if practiced for many years – but hey, no: the event at the Deep Rock Farm was a first timer for everybody! Unbelievable.

LOOKbetween was a magical experience. And I am still a bit at loss for words – and images. So if you want to see more about the event, I encourage you to visit the LOOKbetween tumblr page and to take in the impressions.

I think I can talk for most of us that we were a little overwhelmed and that we would have loved 1-2 additional days to really fully unfold the potential of this awesome get together. And I think the connection aspect is one of the central ones of LOOKbetween.

I am immensely greatful to have been chosen to be in the first group to attend LOOKbetween. If anybody ever gets the chance, please do yourself a favor and attend! Regardless of if as an invited artist or as a visitor.

Below just a vage impression of mother nature watching our show … Huge insects in the projector’s beam of light, like erratic shooting stars, of which there also where many. Enough to make our dreams come true? We will see … and certainly do our share for it to happen.

I regularly get asked if I am still working on MEANING.
I am.

From time to time I have to bridge gaps that become as wide as the universe. Then I stop to think about what I am doing, which usually does not give me any usefull answers. There is a pattern in this experience: Like probably most of us, I do have a very specific image of myself and I often use this image to help me with my important decisions. This sometimes results in a nightmare in which I end up in some corner where I never wanted to go. Why? Because the image I have of myself seems to be pretty inacurate at times and it leads to the wrong decisions.

The gap between phantasy and reality amazes me. Not only in my own person but also in other people, in whole societies even …

This is what got me started with MEANING.

I began with this project a month after I seriously stumbled upon photography in 2008. There was a lot of turmoil in me in direct consequence of that. A world upside down. Very surprising really, to have your life concept shaken up by some event you considered “random” at first – a “simple”* photography workshop. Very disconcerting too. But totally fascinating at the same time!

And even though I actually found all my essential puzzle pieces that year, I still did not have the clarity of vision back then to finish this project. My sight was a bit muddy.

The last 2 years where full of experiment. Experiment with the medium and experiment with myself. Why was I so fascinated by this? What was it? Who was I? Different again from what I thought? Yes, different again.

So now I am putting the pieces together. I am sure it will not go straight. And I will be looking at some more corners before I am done with this. So be it.

That is just how it is with MEANING.

.

*Just to put that one right: I was no photographer back then and my point and shoot did not ask me to know anything about f-stops. I thought that a photography workshop in Tuscany would be a nice kind of holiday with some good talks at most – not unlike other workshops I had visited so far. How mistaken I was! And happily so! I had one of the best and most intensive times in my life. If it had not been this way, it would not have shaken me up as it did.

Here is the first book cover image. Even if I have not started officially yet with this project, I need some stepstones for my thoughts. This is one of them. There are others.

Still working on the detailed concept though – on the narration, which will have much more importance than usual. Still not sure if I will do it all myself or if I will include other people – I guess it means that I have not met the right people yet.

The overall concept of Overtone is clear since September 2009, when I visited Lobo and Marfa in Texas. We were driving through the desert at night, minds wandering, when it struck me out of nowhere. Guess that is how these things always happen.

It was the beginning of a long process of thoughts, of many hours of online research, and of a long list of books I went through. Overtone is going to take me into the music scene … somewhere I have never been due to my damaged hearing, that make me prefer silence over sound. I never bothered about it and I never felt that I really was missing anything. I just concentrated on the visual side of things. Now, obviously, I am totally curious about finding ways to translate sound into an additional layer of meaning for the images I want to do for this project.

I would love to put the project statement up here right now, because I am so excited about all of this, but it will have to wait. I would give away too much by doing this, because there is a relevant twist to the story in this project. And I do not want to spoil the surprise.

I set this project to officially start in 2011. Until then I will be busy with research and with the first part of MEANING, which I think will be a good preparation. A whole new world ahead of me! I love it!

Stay tuned …

blogpost Texas Roundtrip I
blogpost Texas Roundtrip II
blogpost Texas Roundtrip III
blogpost Texas Roundtrip IV

When I went to Kenya in 2006, I saw all these women in Nairobi with the most magnificent braids … each and every hairdo seemed unique, like a signature. It was so beautiful I thought that I would do a portrait-session there that focussed on hair. I remember I spent quite some time thinking about how to best go about this and how the pictures should be done and look like … I wanted to start the project in Mosocho, where I knew I would spend some time. But what was my surprise when I got there to see, that most women there just had their hair cut short like men. That was unfortunate.

I did get some snap shots, like the above, but that was not what I had planned to do. Next time maybe?

In the MoMA I found this piece of artwork from Lorna Simpson (Wigs (Portfolio), 1994). Not necessarily what I would have done but quite intriguing prints of wigs on light felt. I really liked the texture of it … after all felt is made out of “hair”.

The photograph above is from Diane Arbus and one that I had never seen before despite being a huge fan and knowing most of her work.

Even though it was allowed to photograph the images, it was not easy to do so without capturing the whole room – the same problem occured if you simply wanted to look at the images – you found yourself dancing in front of the frames to help separate the room from the picture. There is magnificent non-reflective glas around and I truly wonder why it is not used for these beautiful collections of photographs.

The HCB exhibition was exquisite (no cameras allowed in there, though) and despite of my promise to myself to not increase the weight of my already heavy backpack … I simply had to buy the hardcover catalogue. It is really worth it – have you ever seen an HCB contact sheet?!

(Image shown with permission of the artist)

There is a restriction to 12 participants.
The location will be somewhere between Hamburg and Berlin, Germany, and the workshop fee is 400 EUR (excluding accomodation).

For more information please write an email to Robert Morat Gallery. And hurry up!! The info just came in a second ago …

(Image taken out of the infomail I got yesterday from Little Brown Muschroom Books … I love this picture and I am happy that I got permission from the LBM-team to show it here)

Are you, like me, waiting, waiting and waiting for the publication of The Christmas Tree Bucket? Then this might make the waiting easier: Little Brown Mushroom just came out with Trent Parke’s first book in 10 years (as they say). Apparently it is the first of a series of photographic storybooks for grown-ups. The book is called Bedknobs & Broomsticks and comes in a limited edition of 1000 copies.

So hurry up to get it, they are selling out fast and I am happy to have gotten my copy!

And I just saw that Trent Parke and his publisher are in New York City this Thursday night for a book signing at Dashwood Books. How I wish I were still in NYC … :(

I almost did not make it.

I was not late, my luggage was not to heavy, I did have my ticket, I did have my passport, I did not forget to do anything … BUT somebody changed my name in the system of Miles&More. So when I printed my ticket, I was not I but I was sort of different. Too different.

Calling Miles&More they confirmed that I would not be able to fly to the US with this ticket, but that there was no way to get a replacement in time for the flight and that I probably did change the name in the system myself. That was an interesting argument, because I cannot do that in an existing account without someone from Miles&More typing the stuff in. Very, VERY bad problem management, I thought. So I went up the ladder of responsability and after talking to the boss there they managed to sort things out. And I got my ticket and my name corrected in time to take my plane. But I admit I did sweat a bit. That was close.

I still wonder who changed my data, though … I have this account forever and never had problems with it. But data just does not seem to be safe anymore these days. Too many humans involved.

The good news were: I had a wonderful flight. Just slept right through it.

I am busy, busy, busy and my to-do list is getting longer and longer nonetheless. I think I might have to look for assistance soon.

But yesss, nice stuff ahead. Been invited to a festival in the US this summer. A first timer for me and I am totally curious and looking forward to it! Next I will have to decide on what to submit for the event. I have a couple of things ready to go but I might try to do something new for it – if I manage to find the time. So this morning at the coffee table I started yet another to-do list, to check if and how I could possibly come up with a specific new project until next month. Unfortunately the idea I have in mind is a little complex and dependant on more than one person’s schedule, which might be the reason why it will not work.

So it goes.

This is an old image, from my pre-photography time so to speak, made with my very first point & shoot, a Nikon Coolpix with revolving monitor and a whoping 1200×1600 pixels. I remember stumbling upon this lonely chocolate bunny in an otherwise empty window of an internetcafe while walking to my T’ai Chi classes one night in January (!). It was freezing cold with a harsh wind and my icy hands had a hard time using the camera, which back then still had a metal body (!!!!). They do not make Coolpix like that anymore … Oh well. I took about 12 pictures to get one more or less decent one as it only had an autofocus which did not work too well under the circumstances of bad light and a smudgy window … The one above was the best one I could get.

I had that camera for many years until it fell asleep at a certain point – reacting slower and slower before stopping altogether. I still have it in my cupboard. I grow terribly attached to these objects.

Interesting though … I have always, even back then, taken the same kind of images. I remember all my friends and family constantly complaining: they said they would like the pictures, if they were not that dark and depressing.

I never thought of my images as being depressing.

If I passed this bunny today, I would not react differently than in 2005.

I interrupt the normal agenda of this blog for the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider physics programme will begin with collisions in the LHC at 7 TeV (= energy level) today (30 March 2010).
Several webcasts are available from CERN, including life footage from the control rooms of the different LHC experiments: Atlas, Alice, CMS and LHCb.

There is a schedule page here.
Background videos, interviews etcetcetc here.
There is more information, like the animated LHC Status Display … just look around.

This is just soooo exciting!!!!
After 20 years of preparation … it is supposed to start in 30min. It will take some time to prepare for the injection and … in 1 hour and a half the first collisions at 7eV are supposed to occure.

Oh yeah, they will provide pictures.

Ok … accelerating beams.

3,5 TeV have been reached … The beams go in opposite directions, so the collision speed adds to 7 TeV.
(applause in the background)

Let’s keep the fingers crossed that things work out.
Status now: flat top


Now … patience is necessary. Nobody knows how long really we will need to wait for a collision. And hopefully nothing will force another abort.
They are having a press conference now and I will go and buy some coffee …
The beams are still being held separate by magnetic fields and will have to be aligned before collisions can occure – at least that is the theory.

Forget the coffee … they are aligning the beams now … counter almost to Zero. You can watch it go down in real (web)time. Amazing!

Beams aligned!!!!
YEAHHHH!
Now they are waiting stable beams …
Then the four detectors could start looking for collisions.

More applause!!
Apparently there are collisions but the beams are not stable yet and thus the detectors are not yet collecting data. Finetuning.

Atlas is on. About 40 events each second!!! Well, that was expected :) Nonetheless … FANTASTIC. Pictures will be on soon.

People are extatic!!! (Me too!)

CMS is getting it’s first collisions at 7 TeV too …. Now they are having 100 events each second … wow.
All the detectors are on. Now they are preparing some safety measures to protect the experiments … then the detectors will go on full mode.
Science in the making … It is all prototype.

Stable beams!

Guess, the hard work evaluating the data will start now.
ähm … maybe later.
I hear the word “champagne” over and over .. there are even some glasses clinging together … Guess that is good.
Most of the people are speaking Italian, I hear some German too, and few English words. Nice to being able to follow this. Great job!

A lot of calibration work on the way. Time for celebrations. They sure deserve it.