tobias m. schiel
Made pictures of monuments. Visited an airfield. Contemplated a modernist chapel. Displayed photos from the Airlift Memorial, Frankfurt. Played with eggs. Tried a breakfast table. Was haunted by bunkers. Visited ironworks. Found a way to photograph Wiesbaden’s Monopteron. Was fascinated by structures of a Colombier, a trickle of water. Intrigued by the cliffs of Fécamp. | Please klick the photos for larger images.
One solitary tree.
“In your photos people are not there, but I see them”, wrote Vanni in a comment. I think that’s a good motto for this post – my contribution for the Weekly Photo Challenge.
Weather: Always a bit unexpected, in spite of the forecasts. And who would have thought the light would be like this?
Once I started tracking the unexpected for the Weekly Photo Challenge, I came across a couple of fairly different subjects. In this case, I’d already planned to combine the two (very different representations of femininity) but lacked a good title – the challenge took care of that. I found these statues at Les Jardins du Pays d’Auge (left) and Château de Vascoeuil (right).
Digging into some literature on an altogether different topic, I stumbled upon this paragraph:
“I believe that between utopias and […] heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.” (Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces. Heterotopias)
It made me wonder: Could photographs be related to mirrors? And could a photograph possibly be some kind of heterotopia? After all, photos seem to trigger a strange exchange between my position – here, in front of the picture – and the place they show which is, in most cases, not here, but inevitably there. I am here, looking at a ‘there’ which is very real as a picture and very absent as an object: “There is no there there,” I am tempted to say.
The original idea was to try out a different film, the Kodak PLUS-X 125, processed with Rodinal. Judging from the scanned pictures, my first impression is that it has a rougher, perhaps more old-fashioned look than the T-MAX 400 I usually prefer … While experimenting I realized that these two also seem to illustrate the idea of this week’s photo challenge.
A contribution for the Weekly Photo Challenge: Masterpiece. This Monopteron, located on Wiesbaden’s Neroberg, was designed by P. Hoffmann in 1851 who used forms of early Florentine renaissance. So it appears to echo an echo of Greek Antiquity. But still: I like this building’s elegance and its sense of lightness (especially on a bright day), an I am intrigued by the way its circles and arches seem to form a vortex in this picture.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Companionable
Weekly Photo Challenge: In the Background. Photographed with the kind permission of air traffic control at Verkehrslandeplatz Mainz-Finthen (EDFZ).
An interpretation of the Weekly Photo Challenge.
Spielende Hengste (Playing Stallions) by German sculptor Gerhard Marcks. The sculpture was commissioned by a local insurance company in 1962 and donated to the City of Wiesbaden in 1963. It refers to Wiesbaden as a host to the Pfingstturnier, an annual horse race of international scope.
If things pan out as planned, this picture will be part of a larger series called Le città e la memoria (another bow to Italo Calvino) which will explore landmarks, memorials, and some buildings.
This is my second contribution for the Weekly Photo Challenge.
empire of lights 