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

Autumn trees 3

Autumn trees 4

What is photographing? First answer

photographing means to dream. To see the inner world with outside eyes.

What is photographing? Second answer

photographing means to make a cut-out, a selection of all what we see. That, what we believe is important, we want to fix. But neither our photos nor the beloved object will last for ever. They are just a draft for the moment. If they are blurred, the same thing happens as with wet writing ink: the circumstances, the hastiness of the moment affixes its stamp on the document.

Photoart & circus

When we are talking about art and illusion, what is a better example as artist a circus?

circus buisiness

What they do, is not unreal. But their art or "buisiness" is to bring good illusions, great feelings into to head of the visitor. Feelings of admiration, feelings of serenity, feelings of joy, maybe even sometimes feelings of (controlled)fear or horror (working with the tigers).

Thats what all arts have to do.

Photo art is nothing else than a cirkus performance: we produce feelings in the eyes of the spectators.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

"This is not a pipe", was the undertitle of a painting from René Magritte, the famous belgian painter. His picture showed a pipe, but of course, the picture was not a pipe. Another painting showed a green apple. "This is not an apple", Magritte undertitled his picture. No, you cannot eat the picture, the picture of an apple is not an apple. René Magritte made use thinking about the thing itself and the picture of the thing. The picture is nothing than a symbol, the idea of a thing.

Ceci n´est pas une pomme

Maybee in that time or even today people believe, that a photo showing a thing is the thing itself. But exactly a the painted picture, a photo just is the idea of a thing. Many people forget this simple wisdom. If they see a photo in the tabloid or a film in television, they believe, they know reality. Of course, that is completely nonsense. Just some people want to give them a idea about what reality could be. You alway must be aware of this difference. What you see here... it´s an idea in your head.

Ceci n´est pas une femme

But when you are aware of this difference, if you are aware, that a picture is only the idea of a thing or a person, you also have to give up the thesis, that a photo alway shows reality. They don´t even claim to be reality. So nobody has the right to blame me, if my photos mix reality, they mix coulor, they are -bluntly spoken- unreal. They don´t disguise being the result of reworking, the end of a edeting process, a trancription or compilation. There are many words for this process. Only one word I do not use: Manipulation. That is to negative. Because, the changes of an image I dont realise with my hands (mani-pulare), I do it with my brain.

Ceci n’est pas la réalitée

As magritte, I just want to give you an idea of a thing or a person. About one and the same object, there can be different ideas, different feelings. My picture speak blunty of this different views. I want to show, how many realities one object or person can have. That also is a kind of relativism.