Test

Let´s make a little test: what do you see here? Cave-painting from the stone-time? Microbes under a microscope? Abstract árt? Nothing of all. A photo of the planet mars, redoubled by mirroring...

fried egg - sunny side up

Today I show you something, which seems very real. A view on sand and stones. Nevertheless it´s uncredible unreal. It´s 80 millions kilometers away. A video from mars. Check the following adress:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/mer/mer20080204/

No painter could send a better illusion in our mind than the automatic camera from the mars robots.

Unreal /real

This could abstract art. You agree? But it also shows a scientific photo from a mars mission. So what! Where is art, and where is sience?

Sorry for shocking you

Sometime people tell me, that this kind of photos is "manipulated" too much. I dont blame them, but the accusal seems ridiculous to me. First of all, also "normal" photos are "mainpulated". You "manipulate" with choise of the object, with the cut-out, with the selection what you show big and small. Sometimes you can even "manipulate" with reality. For example by eating blueberries before you make a photo of the tongue. But manipulation, is that something bad? Only if you hide it. Otherwise it just is another word for: attaching a denotation, a sense or significance to a person or a thing.

Even the horror is a significiane, a meaning, a feeling, a fantasy...

mountains

One subject, I could depict without end, are mountains. In all forms and in all stadia of abstraction.

abstraction I

Abstraction by image editing is like the transmigration of souls. A photo is changed completely, all external forms are distroyed, all measurable weight is lost, but still the concentrate of colours and feelings survive.

abstraction II

You find motifs for abstraction everyhere. Even the corner of a empty room can change into a mystic sign.

The other side

I admit, somethimes I also begin my work with brush and pen. May be that´s not my strong point. But it helps to understand, what we work on a photo.

Tapas

Tapas means cover. It covered the tea or the glas of wine. In the proper sense, a photo is a tapa too. You see it on the first look, and it covers the thing itself. The foto is a symbol, a cipher or code for the reality.

hunger

The night, that means hunger for everything, for bread, money, beer and love.

Cho.land is everywhere

The night, that means concealment and danger, quietness and agitation, the night conjuncts all these contrasts. The painter must be there. Vincent van Gogh with his "coffeehouse by night" may not be the first, but he was the most persuasive to express this.

LIghts of the city

As I said, the nightly city is fascinating me. Why? Because there is only the darkness an the light, black and pure colour. Shapes an patterns loose their relevance, all that is left is sound, locomotion and colour.

The town of the flying rabbis

With picture montage we can even touch surrealism. Krakow, the town of the flying rabbis.

Apollo theater

All in one: architecture, night lights, abstraction and reduplication.

Rainy mountains

One priniple to "produce" beauty is abstraction, colour-field painting, dispensation of everything unimportant.

Beauty

Another principle of beauty is harmony, harmony produced by symetry and duplication.

Nocturnal Walk I

One subject which is fascinating me since many years are the lights of the night, the noctural lights of the city. It´s a strange but exciting world, a world of dreams, dangers and wonders.

Nocturnal walk II

Here version II. More abstract.

abstracts

If you enlarge details and intensify the colours, you very often find details of an unknown abstract beauty. Of course, hazard plays a big role, but you can govern the hap. Plan and hazard play ping-pong.

Eros I: Dont be so cruel to show all

Sadly, my interest for erotic photos is misunderstood persistently. Very often men send me photos of their more or less chubby wifes; the women on the pictures are more or less nude, sometimes with dessous or fetishdress, sometimes in front of a expensive car or in a stuffy house. Often these photos show genitals as clear as the pattern of the curtains or the untidy mess under the bed. I wonder, why do people believe, that this kind of pictures is erotic!? For me, an erotic photo must be the unbroken seal of a mystery. It must urge the spectator, to invent a whole fairy tale in his head. And please, dont show the sockets....

Eros II: The holy of the holies

The less it shows, the more it leaves space for the fantasy. The fantasy will even go on, when your eyes have left the foto. An erotic photo is not the same as the photo of a second hand car. The photo of the second hand car must show every detail, every accident, but this idea is not useable for erotic photos. An erotic photo is not a document from the dissection room; it is a living beeing; it lives from a gest or the scenery. Never use clear or hard light, the light must be soft and warm. Reduce, concentrate on the beautiful aspects. On every body you will find beautiful aspects or interesting parts. Trap the beauty, where you can find her. Reduce, tell a story and avoid the templation to show all. Lear from the catholic church: The holy of the holies is locked away most of the year.

Self portrait

May I introduce myself? Hi, I´m Henry. A man without face? Not in reality. But for the internet it´s fitting like this. The net is anonymous. It is better, not to show your face. Or even if you want to show it, it´s not really interesting, it remaines the face of someone one a page, you maybee will see only for seconds and then never again. For this kind of communication, the face does not matter. What matters, are only the fotos, and the ideas you can read on this page. That´s why the hat is burning red (-: And of course I must accept also for myseft what I write here: The most important is reduction.

Fan

Reality is like a fan. If you really look good, you can fold it back and you see lots of stories.

Look exactly!

The allergory

The immense foto of a young lady contrasted with a little sculpture on the right hand side.

Steps

The steps from the photo to the painting are long. You can count them in hours or as a sum of many interlocutory decisions. Hundred or more.

Look behind the mask

Fantasy

For more than one century, photography meant reality, and painting signified the contrary: fantasy. Today, this contrariness is no longer true. With the modern technics, photography is connoted with fantasy as well as painting.

Dreams

Dare to dream. Mix reality and magic.

The analogy

Draw an analogy. Skin and Bark. The bark is the skin of a tree.

Of course this was a photo too

Of course, with a good edeting programm, everybody can change a photo to a aquarell painting. But there´s a trick. Before the picture is chased into the painting programm, it must be perpared. Burred and intensified. Then, the painting programm can do a good job.

Cemetary

The duplication or multiplication of an object makes us think about it. Natural multipication is like a song with many verses.

Landscape /Seascape

The seeside is one of the most frequently photographed object. It is very difficult, not to produce the habitual sundown or the dull ligne of water between beach and horizon. Sometimes an object on or in the water may help, a ship, an animal or a swimmer. But how the show the "pure" seeside? Only colour and symmetry can help us... the symmetry of water and heaven.

Seaside 2

Where water an earth meet each other, often you will find a lovely symmetry. Natural symmetries are even more beautiful than vertical flips. The symmetry doubles the object and helps us so to see the most important aspects. The duplications makes us hear the inner rythm of the picture. Here: the eternal fight between land and water.

Seaside 3

Sometime abstraction may help. Here the roof of the seeside taverna.

In a world with too much informations, in a world with too much optical stimuli it is a necessety and a virue a the same time: reduce information. The hero of today is no longer the person who is bending your ears. We suffer from to many no-sense informations, from showmasters without message and from trash-talkers of any kind. So the most important today is to reduce ... and remain silent as long as we dont really have a message.

Seaside 4

Again: Never show more than necessary. All what you need to show for the fight between land and sea is the blue of the water, the brown of the rock and the green of the plants.

Now let´s talk about architecture

Watermusic in a swimminghall

Colours reduce structures

This was a chinese skyscraper...

Colours build structures

Mitoray. Scuptor of our time

Now I want to talk about Igor Mitoraj, the fascinating polish artist. I had never heard of him, before I realy stumbled over his art sculptures in very different places of the world. Under palms...

Fragments

...and in the snow. Some day I discovered, all these sculptures were produced by the same man. It took me some time, to understand his art, his view of things. Mitorays objects always are uncompleted, fragmentarily, injured. Broken.

space for the fantasy

They look, as if a field archeology of the future just had excavated them. Mitoray just shows, what seems to be important for him, and he leaves enough space for the fantasy of the spectator, to accomplish the statue in his mind.

Dare to cut!

What we can learn from Mitoraj, exacly as from every distinguished surgeon, is: dare to cut. Cut out everything superfluous. For the fotographer there are other things to cut away. You may cut away the colour, or a part of the scene. Leave just, what is important.

Landscape1

Sun and summer are concentrated in these colours.

Landscape 2

Also here alienation may help to get a new and courios look.

Landscape 3

What looks like a hokey or even trashy painting, once began as a photo from Italy /San Remo. But I swear, realaty was as suggary as it looks (-:

Landscape 4

What looks as an old printing is a colour-changed photo from Spüggen /Switzerland

Landscape5

Bertold Brecht described the socalled "V-effect" (alienation-effect) for the theater. There also is a V-effect for photos. With unreal colours they are strange and you look at them as if you had never seen them before. The alienation make them worth staying, lingering with your eyes over them.

Autumn trees 1

The paradox is: With exaggerating the colour you underline and emphasise a special aspect of reality - the "burning" of trees.

Autumn trees 2