Project Silhouettes

Today, Time Magazine Light Box featured a reflection on the calendar year with a series of 357 photographs of silhouettes. I felt particularly inspired myself by some of them and reviewed my street photography gallery to identify my silhouettes. Over the years, I've shot a considerable number of them but few really managed to stick transcending the moment and the location, whether it will be a mischiveous group of 20-year olds enjoying the late September sunshine at the lake, or the treasured autumnal sunshine of Berlin or the hot summer sun of Frankfurt refreshing from the fountain water, they all come together as a sharp cutout of their everyday reality.

The Contrasts of Berlin

You walk along friedrichstrasse and from one end to the other you experience several diverse and often incompatible worlds. And it isn't a smooth transition either. You have the delapidating building and right next to it is the 4-star hotel with its imposing facade coming out of the imposing 20s of the industrial and construction grandiosity. Right next to the baroque shop full of a mixture of kitch and tasteless perversions.

The Couples of Berlin

I spend the weekend in Berlin. It was wonderful - the weather was fantastic (perhaps does not fit the classical definition of August summer since it was only in the low 20-s), people were out in the streets, clouds were trickling from one side of the horizon to the other (casting the dramatic shadow and the occasional contrast-lowering). I did sleep in on Saturday and I missed the golden light but in some areas of Berlin, the light gets reflected from all possible corders creating a caleidoscope of light, refracted in every window and every alley. It wasn't until late in the evening when I reviewed my pictures that I found out a pattern (pictures not fitting the pattern will also trickle in the blog this week).

What I hadn't realized is that I've been taking pictures of couples everywhere. And it wasn't until I send a few select pictures to a special someone that I realized the emerging pattern. Was this pattern guided by an inner desire to be sharing the exact moments those couples were going through with the special someone I shared the pictures with? Do the objects of our photographic views emerge only because we are actively looking for them? I thought to myself what happened to documentation of the unseen, unobtrusive, uninterfered. Where did objectivity in photography go? 

Berlin is a romantic location. The cafes that welcome couples. The street musicians who, as if hired by a film producers, fill the air with an operetic mood. The colours which, as if sucked up from the view, are soaked up in the viewed as if she's a painter.

The couples are oblivious to the street photographer who, like a voyaeur, scoops every bit of privacy into his pixels.

Conquering Musala 2012

It is not a first time that I am climbing Musala. But it is a first to take the path from Belmeken dam - a 25 km trek on a mostly even terrain with the last 5 km or so with ups and downs on the rocky ground. The bones were crackling, the ground was soft, the sun was rough, the wind was deceitful. You smile together with everyone around, marvelling at the way the water makes its way through the ground, the way the pine trees feed you their green pine cones without protest. You are standing on that edge and hoping that you don't slip; and yet, you come closer to have your breath taken away by the view. You walk into the clouds as if they are a fluffy ball of pink candy cotton. And it melts under your feet just like the real cotton.

Masala Festival with Rosario Smowing and Pinkspots & Der Hutklub

In the words of the Pinkspots, "there is going to be too much testosterone on the stage anyways" with the Argentinian group Rosario Smowing which is why their usual accompaniment wasn't there. And true it all was. The brief interlude to the passion was a gentle, cucumber-in-water subtlety. It was meant almost as a lullaby, to create a contrasting effect to the Argentinian blood. How could they have competed? They couldn't have - which is why they went for the opposite - the one that cannot be compared. And it worked - the moment, the two bands came together, the dialogue began - a dialogue across languages, across musical styles, across sound levels and decibels. And it was then that you realized that is not your usual concert. When the audience started conversing with the signers in Spanish, when the singers welcome the seated audience to reposition and dance - and how couldn't they when their feet were already involuntarily moving in the rhythm of the swing. They give each other boost through solos that glamorously focus the attention on the improvisational capacity of the musically inclined - because they are in their moment, their world. For them, the audience is part of the musical instrument, the instrument is their voice, their colleagues are the admirers and admired. This was a concert that reversed the roles of the audience and the performers - because the audience was singing along, and because the performers were doing it for themselves. And this is when I get the goose-bumps - when the connection gets established on the crossroad between the roles - when the juncture is crossed as if jumping on the next train platform to the train moving in opposite diction. Hop on!