I confess that i am more than a bit nostalgic for my old mechanical Nikon that died 10 years ago or so. She had been doing a great job for many years and i have the photos to proof it. 😉
Myself, i have been refusing to have my picture taken for the longest time in my life and have been dismissing photography altogether.
Fixing the flow of life in a snap! Thats what i did not like.
But then – thru a lucky circumstance – i was offered a camera and a task to do with it: make portraits. And i was hooked!
This camera, a battered classic Nikon, became my companion and my means of expressing things i saw and felt. And how i saw them. And it became my teacher to look and see in more conscious ways. To see how things are composed and arranged by life. To look beyond the surface of faces and things. To capture atmosphere and the soul of what i see.
A real adventure and a growing it was for quite some years, a precious phase of my life.
~
Since then smartphone cameras have taken over and the social media accounts are flooded every day with millions of selfies and baby photos of all kinds. With Instagram filters on them and without, all in all an immense quantity of ex-and-hop picture-making.
And in the latest attack on good visual taste or artistic ambition, AI generated image-slop is already seriously congesting the internet.
Unfortunately i am not kidding.
The art of slow photography, of deliberate picture-making, of patiently allowing the right moment and the inspiration to arise, of composition and artful post-production in Photoshop or the lab seems to be mostly forgotten – or seen as an old-fashioned hobby for a few B&W enthusiasts 😉
I am not saying that you can not create art-full, soul-full pictures with a simple phone camera. I know i can. And i guess you can do the same with an incredible expensive Large Format Box Camera or a Hasselblad or a Leica … (Oh how i would love to have such one ; )
I am saying, that it needs inspiration, intuition, instinct, patience, experience and feeling to make pictures that speak to the soul, that can touch the viewer.
It needs the eye of the soul, this is how i would call the secret ingredient that can capture magic and make a different.
Such photos then can endure and be displayed in Museums or specialized galleries.
I don’t claim to have this eye and i have mostly stopped doing serious photography altogether.
But here i would love to create a little photo gallery, a homage to the photographers that have truly inspired me in the past. And still do.
Here i wish to pay homage and express my gratitude to a few the masters that touch my soul.
It was hard to choose which pictures to show, but it also has been a very interesting process to do it.
Hope you enjoy!
Try to spend more than 2 seconds at one photo, it pays off!
👁️
And here are a few examples of my own attempts to do photography (as a way of art )
Or check my photography website: dare to be seen
