This Camera came to me as a birthday present three days before I was moving to Würzburg. Actually the camera was for documenting the birthday party, but we forgot it. So this camera was moving with me to the new town... in this new adventure.
Two and a half year the camera was by my side. - Too long for a disposable
camera. The half of the photographs were not able to be printed. The chemistry inside destroyed the pictures before they even get developed.
But this little Blackbox made me think about photography in an other way.
What did I photographed? When did I thought about the camera and took them with me? In which moments I took a picture? What happend, when I took a picture?
I don't recognize these things, when I use my smartphone to take pictures.
My first intension was to say I want to photograph special moments, moments/ places I feel lucky. And that was possible, because I was alone. But after some weeks, there were also "people" who made me feel lucky. So the photographs lost there symbolic and expressive function of representing my single lonesome feelings. Engaging other people to this process of photography creates a new moment.
Now I have pictures of people I love, like or/and haven´t seen for a long time. AND I have memories of making pictures which I will never see, because the camera was broken.
When I think about photography as an embodied practice, there is also intersubjectivity we have to talk about. Sometimes it was fun to made a picture. I ask my friends to do something. Others were not really interessted by taking pictures by a disposable camera, because they saw me as an artist who did her work.
In some situations I realised, thinking about taking a photo and then taking a photo is a special kind of attention.
On the one hand, I have to recognize that this is a intense Moment, but on the other hand I am outside enought to think about a photograph. In intimate Situations I don't want to take pictures. What doesn't mean, I didn`t interrupted such kind of moments for other ones. Maybe because I am a frightend, self-destructive asshole... sometimes... And I used this in a way encroaching practice to made my point. - To get a distance to my own feelings and hide behind my camera. But thats no topic for today.
What I want to say is that after I was taking a photograph I actually understand, that it was an very close Moment for the other person. And the second thing: There is another Person on this photo, but itˋs never about them. Itˋs not about persons I liked or loved. Itˋs about I feel comfortable and safe. - They made me feel like this.
Products of Photography canˋt tell us truth, but photography as embodied practice gave as borders beetween subjects. The photo is an assosiative tool, to remember this borders.