For me photography has failure built into it. It’s about this wish to possess time, but you never can, you can’t preserve a moment. It’s a medium of desire, and of trying to fulfill that desire, but never reaching it.
— Alec Soth, in: Ping Pong Conversations
I just sold my old Nikon D5300. That was a surprisingly sentimental moment. Although I had already bought a D750 last year and I’m using this one almost exclusively, I was still hesitant to sell it: I told myself, it would be nice to have a second body, put another focal length on it and fiddle less with the lens-swapping in the middle of something interesting. I never did that, it is just not practical: This summer, for my Roadtrip, that took me from San Francisco to Seattle, I already brought three cameras (the other two being an Analog Nikon FE and my tiny Sony RX100), the idea of schlepping another body through the US is just ridiculous. So, the D5300, that I loved so dearly for its light weight and the fold-away screen, my very first digital SLR, the one I had so much fun with in Japan and which basically taught me everything I know – it just gathered dust. And now it had to go.
I bought my first SLR for 40$ on a flea-market in Brooklyn while on vacation in 2014. It was an Minolta SRT MC-II, a beauty from the 70ies, which even included a light-meter that actually worked after I had replaced the batteries. I had never owned an SLR before and I had only been shooting with simple digital point-and-shoots up to this point. I took a photo of the Flat-Iron building in Manhattan. I photographed the subway and sneakers in a shop-window. I liked the way the world looked through the viewfinder. I had my photos developed at Luster Photo in Greenwich Village and I felt like a little kid on christmas, when there was actually something to see on the developed images. After all, photography is magic. The rest, as they say, is history. I didn’t put down the camera since then.
When you go to a photography workshop, it is either all about technique and the guys (there is a strong male bias in these kind of workshops…) rap about why this camera is the best and that one is the absolut shit without end. When it comes to “art”, nobody talks cameras anymore. Don’t know, seems to be an unwritten law that the really good photos are made with heavenly intervention only, not with a piece of metal and glass: The saying is, it simply does not matter what you use and a good photographer can shoot with anything. Being new in these circles, I earned a lot of scorn for my constant asking, how did you do that, what were you using? Still, everybody seemed to have this silent, almost erotic attachment to the gear he or she was using, guys(again, strong gender bias) wearing several thousand bucks in gear round their neck…
As I was about to buy my first DSLR, I became obsessed with camera-technique. I swear, there was at least one point in time where I knew every model available by heart and could rattle down its specs and compare sensor-sizes and resolutions, dynamic range for pretty much all of them. It was a nightmare, I had absolutely no idea what I was looking for in a camera.
In the end I couldn’t sleep any more, the time to the next vacation ran out and I decided to buy something cheap and try it for a while: I went into a department store and bought a D5300 with a cheap kit-lens. In Japan I bought the Nikkor 35mm 1.8G DX to go with it and that was pretty much what I did for about a year. Later I bought a 50mm 1.8, but barely used it: With the crop-factor of the DX-sensor, it ended up at a very awkward focal length and I had trouble being either too far away or too close with this lens.
While it is true, that at some point in time, it doesn’t matter what you are using, your view of the world will somehow come through independently of the equipment, the opposite is also true. What you are using shapes how you view the world and which images you can bring home. The Heidelberg-pictures are from that time and I am now having a hard time to add anything to this series: Even the same motives with a comparable focal length come out with a different vibe. The smaller sensor actually and the larger depth of field that goes with it shape how you view the world. While this is pretty much the only difference between DX and FX, this difference alone is so huge as to render the D750 useless for the Residency-pictures…
At first, I thought, fine: then use this camera for this and that camera for that. But this is not how it works. Bringing three cameras on travel is borderline insane, bringing a forth one is way down into nuts-territory. So I got used to the greater grip of the D750. Feel is something that does not show up in the specs: I thought about going mirrorless for a while (because everybody does it, which is an excuse as good as any…), until I had a Sony A7 II in my hand and did not like the feel of it. Plus it looks ridiculously unbalanced with everything but a pancake lens or the super-expensive Leica-lenses. I now feel at home when I carry the 750. So, the D5300 has to go: I do not want to turn my attic here into a photo-museum (at least not more than it absolutely has to, since I bought a SX-70 Land Camera in a thrift-store somewhere in Oregon…) and I’m fine with using one camera only for a longer while…
PS: I initially wanted to write about the Roadtrip-images, that slowly start to pour into the flickr-accout, but this turns out to be more difficult. It’s so many pictures and there are so many things going on in there. From the sudden emergence of color to the pursuit of some weird political agenda, which is certainly not mine to pursue, to the numerous small stories in there, that I’m having a hard time to come to terms with it. I currently have no idea what to do with this mess. I’m looking for an angle here, and currently I can’t find one or I find way too many. Like Alec Soth said, “So much of the art of photography is editing” (in the wonderful “Ping Pong Conversations“, where he talks with his curator Francesco Zanot about his process of photographing and editing and how his projects came together) – and currently I’m failing miserably at that. Of course, I will stick to it and will look for some help with it, but for now I just drop the images into flickr…