Once in a lifetime…

One day you may find yourself in a shotgun shack
One day you may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
in a beautiful house
with a beautiful wife

And you ask yourself: How did I get here?

Turning 40 today… feels funny!

Some people are…

Some thoughts from today’s bus ride to work:

Some people are like digital images. They are pretty, colorful and sharp. There is some sort of automatic shadow lighting and they look all perfect and shiny. However, the highlights get burned out quite easily, they all look kind of the same, and most of all: They all seem to lack depth and suffer from chronic shallowness. It’s a quick impression that usually doesn’t last very long.

Fashion photography is similar: Pretty shiny images of beautiful models. Too bad, though, the impression is only meant to last about 10 sec. before we flip to the next page. The image just as the model is forgotten within a moment.

That’s all for today…

going home?

Cologne Cathedral & Train Station, 2008:

This week we will go to Germany and spend the summer holidays with my parents in Cologne/Germany. A lot of people ask me if I am “happy to go home?”.
“HOME”, what is that? I left Cologne about eight years ago. After that I spent two years in Singapore, then five years in Shanghai, and after a job change me and my family settled down in Singapore again in 2008. Even in Germany I have lived in different places, Cologne was just the last one. I go back maybe once or twice a year, usually only for a few days.
People tend to define you by the region/country/city that you come from. In the old days that would have been the place where you were born, where your family and childhood friends live. In Chinese that even translates to “Ancestral District”. But today people are on the move. We change jobs, cities, houses, even friends frequently. Even out parents move, so what remains of our childhood home? Just a fading memory? How shall we define ourselves in these times and how do we define the place that we call home without letting this term becoming an empty phrase for something like “temporary residence”?

As for myself, I have started to make home literarily “where my heart is”. That is my wife and my children. As long as I am together with them, I fell at home, and at peace with myself. Nevertheless I feel that every place on this planet where I have spent some time, where I felt attached, belongs to me and my life. In this respect there are many places that I could call home. Where ever we go, we leave a trace and that’s how it should be!

ROMA

Today is one of these days when I would like to be in Italy… don’t ask me why!

Family

Last week I watched a talk show on German TV. It was about new custody regulations for divorced families. The participants spent a lot of time argueing about whether the new regulations were defending the rights of the mother, the children, or the father. The main complaint was that without proper financial support from the father of the child the mother would have to go back to full time work which would then leave the children without anyone taking care, thus serious mental damage would be the result.

While I was listening to the discussion, I was constantly asking myself “Aren’t there people to support the single parent? Where is the family, the grandparents? That’s when I remembered this image that I took in Bangkok in February 2009:

I have been in Asia for eight years now and noticed that the the fact that nucleus family structures are mostly still intact, single parents still have support and back up, even after a divorce. Grandparents are traditionally the people who take care of children while parents are out to make money. This is their classic role and they do it very well.
In my experience, the more people a child has he/she can relate to, the healthier the child will grow up. These can be parents, grandparents, relatives, neighbors, teachers, friends… anyone really, as long as the relationships are stable and lasting.
I my opinion the problems in Germany are not caused by a lack of legislation (there’s plenty of it in Germany!), but due to the fact that families are to small. If there are only The parents and the child(ren) then there is no one to fill the gap when one person leaves.

I always find it very refreshing to see Asian families still helping each other!

About Photography

I am just back from a vacation in Bali and the film rolls are in the lab so there is nothing to show today. my head is too full to just write something, too. As an alternative, I am posting the (true) words of someone else (kenrockwell.com) that I just read:

Photography

Photography is a means of expression, just like writing or painting.

Because photography is a means of expression, you have to have something to say, or your photos will suck.

Blindly pointing a camera and then expecting to whip it up later in Photoshop always results in crap.

Buying a Nikon D3X, Leica M7 or Canon 1Ds Mk III and expecting it to make sharp photos doesn’t happen. Sharp photos come from sharp minds expressing ideas clearly.

You don’t need to be able to express whatever you’re trying to say in words or any other form, so long as whatever you are trying to express comes out in your photos. Composition is key.

Photography is an art which, like most art forms, happens to use some technology, but photography still has nothing to do with technology

Because some technology is involved, there are always legions of unseeing people who just don’t get it. If you’re not an artist, it’s easy to miss the whole point and spend a lifetime reading books (and websites like this) fretting the tech details and buying too much equipment, instead of learning how to recognize what makes good photos and doing it.

the square and the sea

This is a picture taken on a Malaysian beach in October 2008 where we spent a long weekend scuba diving. I was trying out the potential of my new HOLGA and was amazed by the amount of nice motives that you can find on a beach. And the light was just beautiful.

This is also another example of the square as such a simple but perfect frame for composition. I am always struggling with rectangles, especially the 3:2 ration that is standard on a 35mm camera. How do you fill a longish wide rectangle, making use of the whole length? Not easy!
With the square I never have problems. It just comes naturally, like a natural way of putting things in place. Maybe that’s why the Old Chinese used to see the world as a square?

Working in Projects

If there is one thing that I have learned during the past years, then it is that the quality of my work becomes much better when I work in projects. Like most people my photography used to be rather spontaneous. It’s like when people tell you they never leave home without a camera, or they walk out onto the streets to shoot what comes intotheir way. This seems to be the “Henry Cartier-Bresson” way.

Well, to be honest, I don’t think that any of the street masters of the 20th century ever worked that way. Random shooting, in my experience, usually leads to random photography with over 90% of rubbish. From my experience I can tell that my results become much better if I have at least some kind of theme in my mind before I take my camera out. Then I know what to look for with much better results.
For the last four years, I have mainly been working in projects. That means I spend a big time of thinking about topics, set ups, perspectives etc. before I start to fill out what has been an idea and now becomes reality. When there is an idea, a plan, a structure, the results become much more consistent, much more thought through. Planning usually includes decision about the theme, the perspective (i.e. the camera), the film used, light and picture format. Usually I have a list (in my head) about all the things I want to have covered so that there is nothing missing.

An example of a rather formal street project in Shanghai is this image. I took my Mamiya onto the street, placed it on a tripod and asked the bypassing people to pose for a portrait, on a stool against the wall. The plan was to get a good overview of ordinary people in Shanghai (urban China) at the beginning of the 21st century. I chose a fixed camera position, neutral daylight (Spring and Autumn mornings) and always the same Color slide and/or b/w film. The project went on through the years 2005 and 2006 until I had the feeling that I had covered a good range of different characters.

Today this project alone means more to me and shows more about the place than hundreds of random street images I took during my first few years in China. It just makes more sense and is simply more thorough and complete than anything I could have done without a project theme. A good lesson about photography and the creative process!

The Maid

This is our maid Puji, together with our daughter Maya. Maids also run under “Nanny”, “Ama”, “housekeeper”, “domestic help” and other terms to describe what they are or what they do. Sometimes they work during the day, for a few hours or full time.

In rich Asian or Middle East countries (Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong etc.) they usually come from the poor neighboring countries like The Philippines, Indonesia, or Sri Lanka/India. They stay with you and are more or less part of the family, taking care of household and children.

Most of these women come from poor backgrounds and work abroad to support their families at home. That means they leave parents, husbands, children behind and stay with someone else’s family for two or more years. Most of the time they don’t see their relatives for a very long time and work on standby between 72 and 90 hours a week (6am to 8pm, six to seven days a week). The conditions they live in mostly depend on the legal protection in their host country and on the treatment they get from their employers.
As one might guess, in some places neither is very good. In the Middle east you often hear awful stories about abuse. Maids have to perform dangerous duties, are sometimes beaten and do not get the appropriate private space. In congested places like Hong Kong it is very common for maids to sleep on the kitchen floor, and even in our pampered Singapore maids regularly have to sleep in the children’s’ room, or in windowless storage rooms or bomb shelters inside their employers apartments. The pay is far below every local standard, regular fixed working hours don’t really exist or there is no control mechanism.
In today’s conditions, the local economies have more or less adapted to the availability of this kind of foreign labor. This means the cost of living is so high that most middle class families depend on a second income which means they need domestic helpers. Thus, the system feeds itself: Cheap foreign helpers create higher (double) family incomes which then lets prices soar. In the end you depend on the maid while there is no market for locals to work part time as cleaners, baby seats etc. Our family is no exception.

To be frank: I welcome the opportunity for foreign people to work in countries where they can make much more money than in their home countries. This means they can support their children, send them to better schools and improve their life. What I don’t like about it is the insufficient legal protection, the lack of regular working hours, and the poor pay compared to local standards. I think “equal pay for equal work” is something that should be achieved everywhere. In my opinion, the current system creates not only a master-servant mentality; it also leads to abuse and a chauvinistic view upon poorer countries and people. Not very healthy for a nation!

So, please, fellow Singaporeans, start to show a little bit more dignity and humanity and make rules that not only protect the maids from abuse but also create a legal environment without too many grey areas. Make it compulsory to provide every maid with a decent room and recreational time! Pay them a fair salary and treat them like employees, not like servants or temporary slaves! Teach your children that every human being has to be treated with respect and dignity and show them that their parents can cook and clean as well, in order to bring up children who will not depend on servants to tie their shoe laces for the rest of their lives!

Merry Christmas!

I wish everyone a happy Christmas celebration, together with your loved ones. I hope everyone is having more fun than these two lonely souls…