Category: Hamburg

Heavy Metal

Filing out the negative holder of a Pentax slide copier.

After toasting a few films with the “Canon P” rangefinder I got in Japan earlier this year I ran into problems when trying to scan the negatives: The film gate of the Canon is just ever so slightly larger than those of the Pentaxes I usually use, resulting in a ever so slightly larger area of film exposed to light. This made it impossible to leave a border of unexposed film around the picture in the digital file, which I have grown used to.

The solution is to file out the negative holder of the slide copier I use to digitize my 35mm films. This leaves just enough room around the negatives made with the Canon to form a black border. The negatives from the Pentaxes are not affected by this.

Below an example taken with the Canon P, now with proper black border of unexposed film.

Hamburg, May 2017. A hammock over the water of the Alster.

Facetten des Erinnerns/Facets of Memory

Unacknowledged by the art community or society at large, in November 2016 Hamburg saw the first large scale exhibition of an art project to tackle the public memory — or lack therof — of the traumatic “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966. As far as I know, the project initiated by Ni Shaofeng, in which he and his friend Deng Huaidong appropriated propaganda photos made during the Cultural Revolution and transformed them into disfigured large scale ink installations and oil paintings, was the first of its kind in the world.

I was lucky to be able to accompany most of the preparatory work leading up to the exhibition with my camera. Now that all the films have been developed and the negatives sorted, I want to share the impressions I captured of the exhibition.

You can find my photos documenting the exhibition here, or through the menu of this homepage.