filmphotography

As I scroll through instagram I often see photos of Coney Island. To be clear, I would never get myself into any of these rides, but the structures themselves, the colors, the sligthly nostalic and kind of creepy feeling and mostly the sadness and tragic stories hidden behind the artificial facade of joy, fascinates me and always captures my attention. close enough I have never visited Coney Island myself, but there is a place in Austria, which is “close enough”: The “Wiener Prater”.

If someone asks me what my favourit film is, I would probably answer Kodak Portra. Recently I also shot a few rolls of Kodak Gold 200, which is also a film I really started to like a lot and since it is also now available as 120 film, I like it even more. A separate review on this film will follow soon. But this review is not about films I use all the time, but rather about a film I never used before, the Lomography Metropolis.

Analog filmphotography is a field with so many techniques and technical possibilities. Most films are developed using a process called C-41. Kodak Gold 200, Fuji Pro 400H and most other films you’ve ever heard of are developed like this. Every company that can develop film will also be able to develop C-41. Silbersalz35 is different, they describe their film as “true cinefilm”. In fact it is KODAK VSION 3 motion picture film.

Recently I bought a Yashica T4. An ugly piece of plastic produced in the early 90s, but why though? I can’t resist analog cameras, but why this one in particular? Although it is, as mentioned, not a beautiful engineering masterpiece, like the much older cameras I own, it is also not a regular 90s point and shoot. The reason for that is its lens, a Carl Zeiss 35mm f/3.5. This detail set’s this camera apart from most of the other plastic cameras from that era and that’s also why a lot of analog photographers these days have or at least want one of these.

I wrote a book. I guess most of you haven‘t expected that. In fact ‚wrote‘ is maybe the wrong word, because there are, besides the title, only two sentences to read in the whole thing. The first one can be found right after the first two blank pages and it reads as follows. “If future generations will ask me about that time, I will pretend I can‘t remember.” This is basically the whole idea behind this book.

As you might have noticed I did a lot of analog photography during the last years. I started with a Canon AE-1, 35mm film, and my grandfather‘s Agfa Isolette II, 120 mediumformat 6x6. Later I found a Shanghai Seagull TLR, also a medium format camera, on a flea market and got my hands on two Voigtländer Vito rangerfinders 35mm cameras. I love all of them and I really enjoy taking pictures with them, but about a year ago I saw some photos taken using a Mamiya camera and so I started to inform myself about this vintage device.

Rural areas fascinate me for a rather strange reason. It’s a world I do not fully understand and a world I don’t belong to. When walking through small villages in rural areas I always feel like a visitor from a different world, even if the village is just 20km away from the city I live in. Old houses build between vast fields and dark forests, communities spread out over a large area, all of this leads to a different lifestyle and how people interact with each other.

Christmas is something special to me. I’m not religious, but this time has some kind of special feeling. It’s about things that happen and people I usually meet during this limbo between the current and the next year. Usually I spend some days around Christmas Eve with my family in the Austrian mountains. This is the most relaxing time of the year for me. We cook, we spend days together and no one has something really important to do.

On a cloudy sunday aftrnoon in August 2020 I took my grandfather’s Agfa Isolette II, loaded a roll of Portra 400 Medium Format film and went for a walk in the suburbs of my Hometown. Alone On days like this, in areas like this, you can feel the emptiness in the air. The weather and also the ongoing pandemic kept people inside. Walking through the streets felt like walking through a ghost town.

This year created a dystopian atmosphere like I’ve never experienced before. Empty streets and abandoned playgrounds in the bright sunlight. Although this is a small town and not a buzzing metropolis like Berlin or other european capitals, it was still always filled with life, at least during the day and friday nights. But suddenly things changed, on the streets and in our heads. We felt haunted by an invisible enemy, a thing we can’t see and don’t fully understand.

I am not a huge fan of black and white photography to be honest. Still from time to time I feel like it is the right choice to create a certain feeling. For me black and white film always creates a somehow dramatic atmosphere, that’s why this album does not contain color. I wanted drama. In the shadows The goal of project was to catch the dystopian feeling of beeing watched by something unknown.

It took me and Martina nearly 14 years to finally decide to get the same surname. We’ve been together for more than a decade before we took two of our best friends on a weekend trip to vienna to get married. This happened on November 16th 2019, just 9 days before our 14th anniversary. Keep it simple We never wanted to have a big wedding with 100+ people and a complicated and exhausting day full of wierd traditions and the need to do things, because “that’s how it should be”.

This project is all about concrete blocks to live or work in. It’s about colors, light, shadow and geometry. Old and New As I walk through cities I always have this feeling of chaos. Buildings that were build or changed since the day the city was founded. Different eras, different time, different styles, build as close to each other as possible to not waste a single inch of ground. Unfinished This album is one that will grow over time, because I think I will find more blocks that need to be added to here.

I am not a good climber. Not at all. I’m a beginner at best. Nevertheless I love doing it. This album was shot during an outdoor climbing session with friends on a single roll of Kodak T-Max 400. Raw Size I think why this black and white film worked so well, was because the contrast plays nicely with the scale and hight I wanted to capture. Also the sunlight creating a white sky and deep black shadows made everything look more dramatic.