Joachim Aspenlaub Blattboldt (麒麟攝影) from Germany

Photography is a kind of visual phenomenology for me. I‘m not an artist, because basically I lack the interest and imagination to stage people or drape things. Usually, I am interested in the ordinary existence of things (without avoiding their inadequacies and flaws) and the ordinary course of life (in its greatness, but also with its flaws and imperfections)—nothing spectacular. That’s why I mostly take pictures of things I just encounter, or scenes that simply occur before my eyes and catch my attention. I don’t often run after a picture, but just take shots of what comes across. I like to control the focus helicoid and iris ring manually. In this way, photography is a form of meditation for me. It helps me to feel at home in a world I otherwise often feel estranged from.

For this, I really enjoy to have full control over the process of taking a picture and shaping the final outcome in regard to the camera and post processing. That’s the reason why I love to use manual focus lenses with a manual aperture ring, why I like to shoot in manual mode with a manual setting of the white balance. Full control over all these parameters mean full creative freedom for me.

While I believe that one has to master the techniques of photography, in the end it's true what French novelist and critic Claude Simon wrote: "Je suis de plus en plus persuadé que la meilleure recette pour faire un chef-d'œuvre est l'absence des recettes." ("I am more and more convinced that the best recipe to make a masterpiece is the absence of recipes.") What is most important is to learn to see again—or as Wilhelm Genazino described it: "In such strong moments of seeing, the child is not entirely with itself or is not itself; it has given up part of its sovereignty to its seeing. We observe among children for the first time what we can call the extended gaze." I think that through an extended gaze we can discover the bizarre aspects of reality and then the certain beauty of the bizarre.

People tell us that we shall entirely live in the moment to really experience life. But how am I supposed to live in the moment? Time as such is abstract. I am only able to commit myself to space, i.e. to the concrete place and environment I find myself in at each moment. By clinging to places, I can immerse in the moment and then remember it later. In this sense, photography for me is always more topographical than historiographic. Likewise, matter matters to me, it is important for my memory. I enjoy and need the tactile impression of things and their surfaces. This is why I like to take pictures with manual focus lenses with a manual aperture ring and why I like pictures with good micro contrast where the subject seems to be tangible or the scene to be walkable.

For some photographers, their art is a question of the decisive moment, for others a question of perfect lighting. All this may indeed be important. But for me, photography is above all a question of the decisive distance. To take a good picture depends on how far you should stay away from the scene in front of you, approach it or even go into it. In any case, it depends on the working distance that you and your subject feel comfortable with. That's why I would prefer to have a distance scale on my lenses in steps and not in meters or feet. Every motif has its appropriate distance that must be maintained or taken. Then you can choose the focal length. This distance can be different at different times, but it is always given or always demanded! In any case, Walter Benjamin knew that things were looking at us. But maybe they do so only from a certain angle or only at a certain time, only from a certain distance. Not always when we want them to, but only when they want. I wish you all great moments, perfect light and the right distance and much success in taking pictures!