Looking at the frequency of my posts here on this site one could get the impression that I have lost my passion for photography…but this is not the case. Not at all! My problem is (and always was) that my professional activities and my family life constantly get in the way. A very typical example of this is the following:
End of last year C/O Berlin announced that they will have a William Egglestone retrospective including a series of large format prints of his Outlands series, which had never been on display before in Europe. The exhibition was scheduled to run from 28th January to 4th May 2023 and guess when I visited it…correct…on the very last day directly after work for the last two hours C/O was open. There is a pattern: I am always very enthusiastic when I read the announcements in the newspaper or the internet and it’s always like “I have to see this” and “impossible that I don’t find a slot to go to this gallery or that museum”. But then I forget to schedule it, memory space is limited and the plan gets overwritten in my head. If I happen to get a reminder of some sort, I usually manage to visit the exhibition. This was the case with Egglestone (and Olaf Heine…Harald Hauswald… Irving Penn….and…), but ever so often the event only comes back to mind after the exhibit is over. This way I missed out on Lee Friedlander last year. The Bröhan Museum showed Andreas Feininger (until the end of May), … and while I’m writing these lines it is already end of June! You get my point.
Writing blog posts or visiting gallery shows or museum exhibits is one thing, but passion for photography should – more than anything else – be expressed by shooting images. But this needs dedication and time for “deep work”, to borrow a book title by Cal Newport. And here is the thing: Not only that I have been neglecting my homepage and missed out on several exhibitions, even more disturbing is the fact that I barely shot any photographs lately.
David Hurn in his famous conversation with Bill Jay “on being a photographer” says that in a real sense photographers are photographers one hundred percent of a time. I totally relate to that and I know the feeling of constantly looking for potential subjects, judging the light conditions and virtually clicking my way through the environment if I’m out and about, but I simply cannot devote one hundred percent of my time to photography. Should I call myself a photographer then, regardless? Did I ever come near a point where I could call myself a photographer, even? Probably not. Since I am not shooting images for a living this is basically irrelevant, but these quotes from the real pros can be discouraging at times especially if you know that they are right! So where to (re-)start again? My choice this year is to follow the advice and take a week off to fully concentrate on learning a new photographic technique. I booked a course on large format photography with the Lette Verein Berlin, a well-known local photography school, and I am pretty sure that this will get my creative juices flowing again. I will certainly share my first experiences with large format here on this channel and if you’re interested in it then tune in after July 23rd to read about my impressions.
Light & Grain 