Anonymous, ACTA, and contradictions

While across the pond, the talks of SOPA and PIPA are toning down (focus shifted to working conditions inChina), it seems today was a day for ACTA to be acted upon. It is an important topic. Not only because of its implications of sensorship, democratic hypocricy, and Orweilian foreboding; but also because of its commercial motivation, political ignorence, and catholic denial. I would not claim to have a full understanding of ACTA, or of democracy, or of freedom of speech, or of policy implementation, or legal predictons, or mafia industry business models. And I would not claim to support a protest for the sake of a protest - an anonymous protest. Is this not a contradiction in itself - to be anonymous to fight against being under identified surveillance? Should we not be going fully public to show that we have nothing to hide? Is it not a contradiction that the oldest form of revolution (a street protest) is attempting to demonstrate that we can and should own our future?

As with many revolutions, this one is also been taken on the street, by the young ones, the college students whose lifes are going to be change by such legislations, the ones who are underprivelaged in society. I was walking among them today, wondering what makes them really tick? Why don't we see professionals in ties among them, what are their expectations, who are they speaking to with such activities (those who make decisions or those who should be joining them), what are they hiding from the "mafia" and what can the "mafia" really benefit from them? Of course, I am beside the point. Yes, I do need to read the newspaper more often.

(And yes, the Oxford comma in the title is important.)

Living alone and Brussels [on compassion]

A couple of months ago, a story began. Many stories begin at any given point in time but we rarely know how the story goes on - like the 1001 nights stories - never ending escape and imprisonment. There are stories you would tell in loud voice, in front of people, without fear of rejection, without being laughed at but with a laugh, stories of mystery and mysticism, stories of complicated plots and characters, stories of linear plots and simple characters ...

I was travelling in Amsterdam when a story began. It had been incubating for a while as all stories do - they are collection of light rays scattered randomly, waiting for that perfect glass element that will focus them at the right time, on the right plain. They are just the continuation of past stories - stories scattered when they reached an end of a path, a wall, a mirror. 

Today, walking the streets of Brussels, the story comes to a next chapter. Today, living alone is not something to avoid - one must get out of one's own imaginary shell - a shell that does not even exist - and walk into the guarded garden of common-hood.

Living alone is not about confusion or loneliness or isolation. Living alone is about enlightenment and freedom. I still do not know where the boundaries of my "self" are, I still look to others with uncertainty, I still define my "self" by the environment and by the boundaries of the "other". I still look for the microphone pointed at me (rather than at the important person in the middle of the square), and I still exchange a smile with the chocolate-drugged teenagers, and I know that the colourful clothing is just a scream "this is me, here! stay back and go find YOUR color!". 

I removed the headphones - I wanted to hear the city and the people; I walked the streets, slowly; I looked like a tourist with a camera hanging on my neck (and on Sunday, that's all that Brussels is about); I used the camera as an eyelid - to wink, to show the others that I am one of them smirking shyly at the peeing boy. And that's not loneliness, nor isolation, nor confusion. 

This is empathy and compassion. This is the power to feel anyone, to be anyone, to define your "self" as someone you admire, to shy away from the world when you want, and to help the shy away from shyness, to morph and be morphed, to adapt and be adaptable. In today's culture, we are lead to believe that knowing who you are, and being yourself is a good thing. And yet, we are criticsed for "having changed", for no longer "understanding", for "being stubborn". I do want to change and to adapt, and to mend, and meld and mold. And living alone helps me expand like water and air - filling the voids in between the others whenever necessary, wherever left.

Photography is History

For well-over a month now, I've been using quite extensively the new Voithländer 35 mm f1.2 II lens. It is a superb lens - it is sharp, it is great to handle, it offers light sensitivity unbeatable in the 35 mm range, and fantastic contrast and color rendition. It is a fantastic black-and-white lens especially when paired up with the Leica M8's infrared sensitivity. And it made me think about what the lenses tell about the picture. 

We've often read about lenses that render vintage, or modern, or clinical, or that are great for color, or that offer surreal rendition, etc. The lenses that we use (figuratively and literally) create their own reality and have their own feel. That's what we refer to "vintage" when we talk about softer lenses. We use them because they capture our own expectation of the world back in those days - ghostly and desaturated. They have melancholic value because we want to live in that world - some of us, anyway. Their low contrast is for us a summary of a historic moment - calmed down, poised, and sometimes flatly boring. We become like the characters in "Midnight in Paris" who cannot live in their own time and look for a future or a past.

The lens is more than just a brush in the hands of the photographer. The lens is the intermediary inner eye, the intuition and the impulse. It is the brush but also the canvas on which we draw with light. It is the paint and the palette.  With a manual focus lens, the photographer is in absolute control of how impressionistic, Cezannian, Bensonian, Cartier-Bressonian, etc. the composition and appearance would be. Super-f lenses, opened to the fullest, gather light that can easily overwhelm the sensor – like a bucket of pain splashed on the canvas. These lensed are made for drawing at night – when each photon matters, when the human eye is not capable of seeing colors, and when people open up to you - by the fireplace, with a candle, under the fireworks.

Then we have a whole new world before our eyes. Colors and colorful people. Smiles and tears. Music and noise (no silence ever). Breath and stank. Toxicity and invigoration. Poets and lyrics. Begging for money and satisfaction without greed. Being of past, and present, and future. A Prokofiev and a Rachmaninov piano concerto – Bach doesn't fit at night but the Russian romantics and surrealists do. 

We are drawn to that world, as photographers. It is revealing, it is unseen. It is a secret. Perhaps, its allure is in its invisibility. Or maybe, photography is just the artist's attempt at escaping death, which often comes at night, in the dark, without us seeing. We all want our picture taken, our presence documented, our loved by our side. The fear of perpetual neglect is what has driven the artist for centuries. So what's so new with photography? Infinite reproducibility? And isn't it through photography that we try to live in another age? To move to the times which we like - recreating the ages, recreating the clothes, the make-up, recreate the greatest and most beautiful era. But isn't any one of them like that? Aren't we all trying to escape the present?

But life is a little unsatisfying. And that's why we need to document each and every part of it - the happy parts and the sad parts, the ones we want to forget and the ones we want to remember forever. But above all, we must document the ones we want to live in.

Living alone and travelling in Amsterdam

Ever since I graduated from university, I've been living alone. It isn't so bad. You have all the time in the world to wake up in the morning, to roll out of bed, the re-imagine the cleaning routine, to make as much noise as you like when getting home, to scream "Bullshit" when you read some ridiculous email (or read the news). It is ok to forget to turn the heating on in the bathroom and it is freezing cold when you get in the shower, it is ok when you accidentally set off the alarm on Sunday morning because you had forgotten that it is a weekend. It is ok to not do the shopping and just order in. It is ok to go to bed at 8 pm, wake up at 3 am, and go jogging in the darkness. It is ok read in bed until you have finished that captivating book and it is ok to fall asleep three minutes after that movie had begun. It is ok to invite friends over for dinner whenever you feel like it. It is ok to leave the trash in even after the fruit flies had become unbearable. It is ok to let the empty jars pile on top of each other until you gather the will to carry them outside to the glass-dispensing container. It is ok to let the dust bunnies invade every corner of the house (they aren't all that difficult to get rid of). It is ok to forget to do the laundry (as long as you don't run out of clothes altogether) and it is ok to use the dry rack as a wardrobe.

Living alone for such a long time makes one incapable of imaging what it would be like even to go on vacation. One gets stripped down from all that defined oneself - because one is defined not by what one stands for but by what the others stand for. We are what distiguishes us from everyone else. But when one lives alone, when one's life revolves just around oneself, one loses self-identity and ends up feeling alone and not being able to coexist with anyone else. And that's why when one goes on vacation, one finds it odd.

So, to avoid such feelings of dream, one surrounds oneself with great people in the office, goes home just when one wants to be alone, and enjoys vacations only with friends and family. This time I went on vacation to meet one of my two best friends from university.

As I am sitting writing this from Amsterdam, I realize even more tangibly one's need of Another - on night 1, when I was alone, Amsterdam was just another city, but on night 2, when I walked around with my friend, we laughed (at Amstermdam's expense) on every corner. Amsterdam is a city of extremes: elegance and decadence, fashion and chic, crowds and loneliness (otherwise, why the promiscuity - no judgement implied), labyrinths and tall buildings (tall by the standards of the narrow streets they overshadow), no open spaces and small closed spaces, couples (and trisomes) everywhere. Here people rush when they walk alone and stall when they walk together. Here people ride on bikes only in couples (because it is just so much more dangerous to do that alone - you ride safer when you have to make sure the Other survives). Here magic happens from holding hands not to get lost in the crowd. Here magic lasts less than a second because there is another one in line. And yet magic stays with your forever like in a movie. Here the morning fog has a wholly different effect than the London morning fog, and that's a good thing. Here "creativity" is an euphemism and a rainbow is not.

And if one doesn't have the other or just another, one will lose oneself in the depths of the city canals, in the fog of its coffee shops, in the lusciousness of its red seductions, and their meanderings through the soul. One's got to be up for the game.

And maybe that's why people from Amsterdam are who they are - gamers - open, ready to smile at the street photographer, multi-lingual, provocative, creative, liberated and extrovert - they need the constant stimulation, the challenge, the extremes, the energy. They need to show proudly who they are and where they are going. Their honesty is admirable (even if unreal in its schizophrenia) and their schizophrenia is admirably honest.

Would I be able to live here among them and with them and alongside them and in them? The small streets, the noise, the danger on the streets (and I am talking about those crazy cyclist and the trams), the lack of private spaces, the old constructions (not to mention that they are all sinking), the potted energy, the suffocating crowd, the expectation...? Those questions naturally come. We talked about them with Nik but then he had a plane to catch and I was looking for someone to experience the city with.

And I found someone. You plan and plan: a small treasure hunt - because you really want to see her. You set up three time slots and, like in the movies, your entire world starts rotating around those time slots. First, you think of lunch but then you don't have time so you content yourself with just some peanuts (literally) - nothing bad in them but you wished for a salad (but she is worth waiting for). Walking a few blocks around - you don't want to seem too desperate (which you probably are if you are thinking in those terms). You arrive early, although your heart already knows that this isn't the time you'll meet her and that the treasure hunt shall continue. Despite this, you actually wait 15 more minutes (of course under the pretext that you can just observe the couples around and take street photographs). After this you give up. Until the next meeting - same place, two hours later. By that time, you know the routine already: walking around almost aimlessly ("almost" because you've got the aim to find a way for time to pass by faster), making a few pictures out of focus to "demonstrate the great patterns the bokeh your lens can do" (which loosely translates to "help time acquire meaning"), you find something else to snack on (this time you wish for something sweet to help offset the gloomy mood) and go for marzipan, and you try to go shopping (but you know perfectly well that nowadays few things are exclusive to that city and you give up to avoid logistics overload). It is in that moment that you realize how much this plays like a movie, perhaps a bit like "Before Sunset", not as much like an Woody Allen as you might wish (because things always end up funny and unexpected in those movies), far from a typical British romantic comedy (no matter how much you'd love to live through one). But it is exactly in the midst of this movie that you feel the optimism so you go for the third appointed time - that one's got to work, right? This time you arrive in time, not too early. And as faith has its way, there is a small temptation on the other side of the street - a street gang playing with the rainbow of soap balloons as big as three people and as colorful as thousands of CoffeeCompany shops with their rainbow menus. You go there and you seem to be more focused, the camera is out, all in manual settings, focusing is quick and determined, and you shoot and shoot and shoot; 5 pictures later, you know you've got it, and maybe she is already waiting. But your heart sinks - there are many people on that square but you don't recognize any of them. You realize that you have fallen for your own overenthusiasm with the hunt. Time seemed to have stopped and your departure tomorrow seems an eternity away. You don't know what else to do, so you walk slowly back to the hotel.

The night seems long, you wake up at 5, try to sleep a bit more, go to Starbucks for your drop of caffeine, go back to the hotel, go through with the teleconference for work and you almost flip when you get that message: "konstantin!!!! no!!! oh my god i was just in the middle of writing you a text message  i somehow thought you still had time to meet up today.... i didn't have internet access during the day yesterday at all  i am gonna send you the text message anyways, maybe i'm in luck...". And it is in that moment that you know that this is meant to be like this - an hour and a half is sometimes all that you need. And you don't know if that conversation was going to change your or her life (what a silly idea!) but you know that you needed it, you feel it through and through, you are engulfed in it. You look straight into her eyes and you know that you won't look away. The thought of missing the train on purpose does cross your mind but that would ruin the spontaneity. The thought of picking up the camera and taking a picture of her comes to you but you quickly dismiss it because now matter how unobtrusive, it is still an extra layer and you do want all your shields down. So, you don't. And you enjoy how she plays with the chocolate wrapping, and how she urges you to run so you don't miss that train and how she actually runs with you to the door. And you feel special because you are the only one who runs for that train with someone else by the side.

And so it is on the train that you think again about living alone, visiting the cities alone, and meeting people with open eyes. It is on the train (funnily enough, not earlier) that you manage to connect the dots and to realize that, yes, she did help you define the borders of who you are a little better, and so do you wonder if she sees with greater clarity as well. And you realize that it is not the "living alone" that makes you alone but the treasure hunt - just because you trick yourself into feeling alone when in fact, the world is always with you. And you smile at the sun, because you've finally figured it out.

1 Year with Leica M9 - Retrospective; and about Berlin

Exactly one year ago to this day, I was lucky enough to meet Guido Steenkamp who just a week ago opened an exhibition in Berlin together with other street photographers from Seconds2Real (the Leica Camera Blog reviewed the exhibition with an interview). He was selling his M9, preferring his analog Leica for his work and I was happy to take the digital one from his hands. With just about 9,085 shutter actuations back then, I considered it practically new. Until then, my trusty M8 was doing a great job and honestly for the life of me I cannot remember why I was so much craving the M9 instead. 

But I did and I was saving my pennies and nickles, sold my M8, and negotiated a price of the M9 and worked for me. And I haven't looked back. I met Guido - I was lucky to have been travelling to Berlin around that time so we met personally and I immediately (and very impatiently) attached the lens I had at that time (a Voigtländer Nokton 35mm f1.4 - not a bad lens but certainly with shortcomings) and I took several pictures the next couple of days in Berlin. I could immediately see the improvement of the IR-filtering, I could see what a 35 mm lens actually does to pictures (full-frame) and I could not hear the metalic sound that the M8 made when it shutter clicked (the M9 has a softer sound). I loved the character of the black paint (the bottom plate was starting to show the brass underneath), I loved the custom-installed black Leica logo (the original is supposed to be red) and the blackened "M9" (originally supposed to be white), and I loved the tremendous resolution (18MP from the 10MP the M8 provided).

A year later, I still feel the same about the camera technicalities. But I have certainly come to understand it better. I can appreciate its colors, I can appreciate its speed, I can appreciate its solid feel and its minimalist elegance. But that's not really what it makes it special - it is a simple thing really - that it is always with me.

Before that, I didn't carry a camera with me all the time. I missed moments. I missed opportunities. And I missed memories. Now, I can rely on always having that camera, and never missing those moments. I go back, just a year with it, but more than 33,000 pictures, and I remember every one of those moments as if it was a minute ago. Because it was - it is part of me now, it is part of what defines me, the experiences I've had and the people who continue to define me. 

And sure, an M8 or even a film camera, might have done the same for me (I did use to carry the M8 with me everywhere as well). And the lenses are indeed stupendous and their interaction with the rest of the system is unmatched (and I have went through a number of lenses including rare pieces of glass such as the Canon TV f0.95 50 mm lens, the temperamental Leica Summilux f1.4 75 mm, the low-maintenance Leica Summicron C f2.0 40 mm, and many others). You know that you are really thinking about the photographic process when gear becomes just the extension of what you do: jf you have only the 90 mm lens, you'd still take that street photograph; if you have only the wide-angeled 24 mm lens, you'd still take that portrait shot.

Because it is not the gear that makes me look to the world with curious eyes but the mindset, the expectation, the curiosity, and the desire to be part of that world around.

'nough about that. Berlin! Ah, Berlin! The reason why I love Berlin so much is the fact that it reminds me so much in some of its  characteristics to Sofia - like the flowers being sold at the bus/tram/underground stations. This is something I remember from my childhood as the characteristic of those stations - those days that I would need to be buying flowers for a teacher or just for my mum and the comfort of always knowing that they would be available and I wouldn't need to get out of my way to actually get them. 

Or there are the building: old, big, made to accommodate a lot of people. True that some of them are falling apart and some underground stations feel scarily much like a morgue. But the feeling of growing up in a similar environment makes me almost automatically feel at home (and yes, I can see the irony of this).

And the light - oh the light is different here. The sun shines the same way of course but you've got the glass buildings - tall and precise. The Sun is looking into them asking "who is the prettiest one of them?" And they all look at the sun for warmth! 

And then our hearts warm up - not only because of the light, not only because of the Parisian feel to all this, not because of the French accordion music that has become a cliche (cliches are there for a reason and I love them), not only because everyone is out with a smile, not only because the rising moon was so big and beautiful between the big glass buildings, not only because of the dance moves I would make from time to time. Because when we feel so happy, we need to share it - to pick up the phone and call old friends, talk to strangers, smile to everyone, and for once play the tourist. And then there are those random meetings that are never random. Meeting an old friend out of the blue on the streets of Berlin and making new friends out of acquaintances and out of strangers. 

One of the very first pictures I took with this camera.

And the same place - a week less than a year after.

Below are some of the pictures I took in Berlin when I visited the exhibition of Seconds2Real in Berlin.

And some street shots from Berlin: