Silk Road Radio

Regret

2010-08-17T02:06:00.000-07:00

Hello dear friends!

I've just returned from holidays/vacation after a period of hard work, but I still regret that I've not been able to follow things here as much as I would have liked to.

I was in the Dresden-Leipzig area of Germany, enjoying cheap and excellent food & beer, and above all lots of photographic inspiration. I include with this a picture of the Monument for the Battle of Nations in Leipzig. It received no postwork from me except a very minor retouch and a square crop.

It's very easy to interpret the Monument wrongly. By the looks of it, it can be mistaken as the brainchild of some megalomaniac ruler. Admittedly, as an expression of German nationalism it was loved by Hitler, and the Kaiser (no stranger to megalomania), Wilhelm II, showed up in his best uniform to open it. However, the monument was conceived at a time when Hitler wasn't born yet, finished when he was still making bad sketches in Vienna and the idea and the money for it came from private citizens, who went out of their way to make it NOT look like the existing monument for the first Kaiser. Also, the monument is said to mourn the dead of of all the nations involved, not just the German. The style of the sculpture is reckoned to be an archaising Jugendstil, not the nameless semi-realistic style favoured by nazi-Germany three decades later.
In the Battle of Nations (1813), armies from Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden decisively beat Napoleon and his allies Poland and Saxony. It took them five days and tens of thousand dead and wounded - never before had so many soldiers fought for so long at so much loss of life. The carnage was only to be surpassed by the battles of the First World War, which started little more than a year after the monument was finished.
For the builders, the victory of Leipzig represented a brief moment in which Germany could have been unified in a modern state, inspired (paradoxically perhaps) by the ideals of the French Revolution. As such the Monument was also the represent German unity. Just as paradoxically, Germans were fighting on both sides in the battle. Subsequently, history has learned that it took wars with Austria, France and Denmark to get unity, more than half a century later and created a autocratic state that wasn't content with its - in my eyes - splendid achievements - with catastrophic results.

After the Second World War, interpretations of the monument have kept changing with the times. The communist regime felt very much at unease with the fascistic taints. It has demolished precious buildings for less, but it decided that the monument celebrated German-Russian brotherhood, as in the Battle of Leipzig German and Russian soldiers had fought side by side. Currently, a similar unease is still felt, both with the nazistic taint as the original nationalistic message, as shown in the commentaries inside the building, and the organisation of a bath tub race in the Monument's huge pond, that's intended to show that the monument can have more than meaning.
To me, all these interpretations show that the Monument is a true and intriguing work of art - but of course everyone is free to find it pig-ugly, and many people do.

You may find more interesting facts and figures in the Wikipedia:
Battle of Leipzig and Monument to the Battle of Nations

The Red Man

2010-04-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, Zoe!

From Dreams of the Unborn:
.... And then there was the world of her dreams, the glimpses in the corner of her eyes, and the fragmented rants by streetcorner mystics, psychotics and drunks - all of whom she seemed to attract with unfailing certainty. They all referred to a world where nearly everything seemed to be different from her own, everything except she herself. She'd find herself walking through non-existent buildings, living with different relatives, and wearing unseen fashions - only she remained the same, and within the dreams, mad visions and rants, the other world had its consistency too. Once she had to run for a drunk who accosted her for not calling a man called Schneider. She didn't know anyone by that name, but she had dreamed about him.
Both drunks and dreams also called her the twice born, and then there were born and the unborn each in their own world, and sometimes, unpredictable in his angry appearances, her opposite, the red man, the twice unborn..."

Still picture

2010-04-12T01:36:00.000-07:00

Part of my probably perennially unfinished novel-in-photos-and-fragments Dreams of the Unborn.

Basic picture by me, two open domain textures added from Bascorpo and Malchik-stock.

Photography going medieval

2010-04-06T07:50:00.000-07:00

The past few weeks I've been experimenting with Holga cameras. When I went out to buy my first Holga 120, there was also a Holga 120 WPC in the display, a panoramic pinhole camera. Basically, it's a black, stretched out plastic box. Photography doesn't come more basic, in fact. There's no viewfinder. There's no aperture or shuttertime adjustment. When you want to take a picture, you press the shutter handle. When you you think the film has received enough light, you release the handle again. With pinhole seconds' long exposure time and aperture indifference, those things are not really a problem. The coolest bit of technology is a level bubble on top of the camera. There's also a little table with advised shuttertimes at the back of the camera. You might use it without people realizing that it's a camera - that's what happened when I tried it at one point.
The result on my test film that I like best is the one that I'm posting with this blog. It's the cloister next to our cathedral, one of my favourite spots in Utrecht. It looks much sharper than it came out of the camera, but after downsizing the negative scan to posting size, software sharpening made a lot of difference.
I can't think of photography getting more low-tech than this, but I hope to do more with this camera in the future. As my brother-in-law pointed out, however, a tripod will come in handy.

Me trainspotting...

2010-03-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

A documentary shot by request, without artistic pretences (ISO overdose). I love the train though...

Salzburg, February 20, 2010

The Stoneworks

2010-03-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

Before digital arrived, and some time afterwards, I've worked with film - too long to foster any romantic ideas about it. A couple of months ago, my interest in square photography made me curious about 6x6, medium format photography. Having a cheap but adequate film scanner and Photoshop, things are different. After looking around for a 6x6 camera and having on loan, I discovered I had one standing in my room, as a decoration. After some fiddling with it, I found out that it wasn't really broken as I had thought, most normal settings worked.
It was my grandfather's camera, an Optikotechna Flexaret II type 3, still carrying the name of the factory that had already been taken over by communist rule and renamed to Meopta.
It's very basic, but it's amazing what you can do with a very basic camera that's still been built with some attention to quality (compared to Holgas, Dianas, etc.) It awes me more than the current computer-with-a-lens, although these can be fun too.

This is a testpicture that I took with it:

An old brick factory in my neighborhood.

Oi Govorila Chista Voda

2009-07-31T12:18:00.000-07:00

A simple post in reply to Zoe's very interesting posting over Kupalo day: http://zoe-in-wonderland.blogspot.com/2009/07/not-very-long-love-story-of-jarilo-and.html#comments

A very litteral translation by "Olga", that I found at Youtube.com with this video:

My girlfriend, blue-eyed stream
Tell me about my loved one
To my restless dreams turn his way
Bring him to your bank
It has happened that I've been waiting too long for him

(Chorus:)
The clear water has been telling Where lives my love
The clear water has been telling How I'm going to find it
The clear water has been telling Why I'm not sleeping at night
The clear water has been telling Whom I'm going to love

My girlfriend, blue eyed-stream
Tell me all the truth about my loved one
Show me him and to my heart, like a bird to the sky, enchant him
It has happened that I've been waiting too long for him
Wise river, help me.

Pagan slavic gods, wise rivers, Summer festivals, it all seems so far away from Transatlantic suburbia...

Her 'Baby'

2009-07-30T02:18:00.001-07:00

The passion for the image is universal, and isn't it that the true photographer can be recognised by his or her gift to look to other things than everybody else?

As the Soul Flies

2009-07-16T21:35:00.000-07:00

For my Imeem friends

More in things than in people

2009-07-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

The perfect picture for a blog that has zero reactions all over.

Dream Big

2009-06-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

When a good friend wishes you 'Dream Big!', what can you do?

For Powgrl

La Vie Bohème

2009-06-26T22:11:00.000-07:00

I've always liked to watch the water.
I've always wondered what's on the other side.

Bankers, priests and lords sit behind their thick stone walls, artists travel. When they're not welcome anymore, they move on. When the source gets dry, they move on. Watched with distrust and sometimes envy, they move on. Taking their old friends in their minds, their hearts and maybe their company, they leave to find new.
Artists upset people, they ask difficult questions and then they move on. They move on, because art moves on. And when they move on, they go through passages.

This is one is for Sophie, who won't be left behind.